After originally offering web server solutions, Nginx has expanded its presence by launching a native application platform. The new development is designed to help organisations create and modernise applications with concepts such as the cloud, containers and microservices.
“A suite of four products, built on open source technology, that together, I believe, will help organisations offer more to a broader, truly global audience. Combined, these four tools at the core of what organisations need to create applications with performance, reliability, security and scale,” Nginx CEO Gus Robertson wrote in a blog post.
Called the Nginx Application Platform, the new model has Nginx Plus on top that brings together a web server, content cache and load balancer. These solutions will work in the background to provide organisations with an out of the box protection for their applications. The second offering that comes with the new application platform is Nginx Web Application Firewall (WAF) that works as a dynamic module for Nginx Plus.
New developments powering enterprise applications
Alongside the two existing enterprise-focused web server solutions, the application platform has Nginx Unit that offers an open source application server. “What makes Unit unique is that it is completely dynamic,” says Robertson.
Users can leverage the advanced structure of the server, which can run applications in PHP, Python and Go, to move to a new application version without restarting any existing processes. Also, Nginx is set to improve the initial Unit version by adding support for Java and Node.js in the coming future. The present model is even claimed to run WordPress sites.
The team led by co-founder Igor Sysoev has also developed Nginx Controller. The new solution is a centralised monitoring and management platform that lets organisations monitor the health and performance of their applications.
Notably, Controller will be exclusively supporting Nginx Plus at the time of its initial availability in the fourth quarter this year, and support only for Nginx WAF and Nginx Unit is in the pipeline. The solution is also close-sourced, unlike the open source Nginx Unit.
The mix of four Nginx solutions under the new application platform package is mainly aimed to enhance the use of its premium web server. Moreover, the latest development would help the company grow bigger and tougher for its closest competitor — none other than Apache.
