7 ms·

The only thing pretty bitter about Nginx is that the access to the server status in the open source community edition. You get only so much with "ngx_http_stub

by frik 10y ago

The only thing pretty bitter about Nginx is that the access to the server status in the open source community edition. You get only so much with "ngx_http_stub_status_module" that you have to compile in yourself, as distros don't compile it in: https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_stub_status_module.html https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_stub_status_module.h... With Nginx plus you get access to so much more ("ngx_http_status_module") of the server status. It's not about the pretty frontend, it's about the values. http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_status_module.html http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_status_module.html Why isn't there a CentOS-style distro apt/rpm package of Nginx (think of free RedHat) with the status module enabled, as based on open source Nginx?

LinuxFreedom 10y ago
It does not make any sense to complain. The constructive approach that lead us to open source world domination goes like this: just build what you need. Start today, publish early, others will chime in and you will have the best status module you could dream of.
daenney 10y ago
> Why isn't there a CentOS-style distro apt/rpm package of Nginx (think of free RedHat) with the status module enabled, as based on open source Nginx? The code of ngx_http_status_module isn't open source (as far as I know). Getting access to it means you need an Nginx Plus license. Someone packaging that up and distributing it for free would be a rather big violation.
simonw 10y ago
This is the classic downside of open source that's supported by a "pro" edition: it encourages maintainers to actively avoid adding features that would compete with the paid product.
- inopinatus 10y ago
  This is similar to the classic blunder by service product strategists who tier pricing by both capability and scale, rather than one or the other. This results in nonselection of the product rather than the hoped-for upsell.
  - exhilaration 10y ago
    "Nonselection"? Did you see the HN post a few days ago [1] about Nginx reaching 33% market share? They seem to be doing very well. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14078589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14078589
    - user5994461 10y ago
      It's simply replacing Apache that is old and deprecated. Nothing fancy.
    - inopinatus 10y ago
      Markets are measured in dollars, not usage. The last press release I read from Nginx* says they have barely more than 1,000 paying customers, and shied away from real revenue numbers, but I doubt anyone would place a bet that it is on the order of magnitude of revenues due to e.g. IIS on Windows Server, or even the revenues that Oracle & IBM collect for their rebadged Apache. * https://www.nginx.com/press/nginx-carries-strong-business-momentum-2017/ https://www.nginx.com/press/nginx-carries-strong-business-mo...
  - toufka 10y ago
    Curious - for us non-strategists could you give another sentence explaining your thought here. I don't quite get why scaling both would prevent a sale - but it appears like hard-earned insight.
    - inopinatus 10y ago
      Sure. And yes it is. Bear in mind my perspective is mostly SaaS B2B. Two perspectives on this: 1. Some of my smallest customers are actually lighthouse customers for the rest of their industry. When they can't afford a price-segmented "enterprise" feature then I miss out on their super valuable product feedback and word-of-mouth. I've seen this pattern in sport, telecoms, public transport, k-12 education. About the only place I haven't seen it is the financial sector. I have been both the customer missing out and the provider in this scenario. 2. If a large enterprise is prepared to buy many units, but won't use your high end features, they can just pay for the cheaper end unit. You likely just missed out on revenue. They may well have been interested in later adoption of your more sophisticated stuff, but because they bought the cheap product it'll never happen because at scale the cost step function of going up a tier is perceived super negatively. So you also miss out on feature adoption and product feedback. I have only been the customer in this scenario. I have seen it in both the financial sector and government. It almost happens in healthcare, but they are easily manipulated into higher price segments by placing HIPAA compliance stuff there. NB: Personally I find that kind of manipulation to be toxically abhorrent and when I've been the customer used it as a red flag against doing business. Nonetheless it is common. Overall- To me, business strategy is all about the creation and capture of value. When you find a product model that creates a virtuous cycle between those two aspects of value, you likely have a winner. The best example I can give validating my experience is AWS, where everyone can use everything on a pay-as-you-go basis. I have been both a customer and on the inside with AWS. The model is incredibly empowering for startups having access to this massive box of capability, and moreover enables enterprises to do long-term planning of feature adoption with price stability. The only time I recommend charging more for an enterprise feature is because it costs you significantly more to deliver it and there is no other way to capture your share of the value created or use scale to drive down the marginal cost of delivery. A wise PM will want to separate that out into a separate product. A classic example is providing a TAM over and above your hopefully already universally excellent support desk. The counter-example to this point of view might be Slack. I cannot fathom why they both tier their capabilities and then charge per seat. Hard to see how SSO and AD sync adds to marginal cost per customer seat, and the storage and uptime promises are similarly paper thin value adds. It is one of the reasons I never recommend them. Yet they are apparently successful, perhaps because their product is crack for dev teams. So execution certainly still matters. And no doubt other counter-examples can be easily found. But if you want to maximise your market engagement, it is essential to know how your customers behave in the product selection process in response to the signals you give them. Sorry that was more than one sentence. I was waiting for a compile.
- frik 10y ago
  True. Nginx got very popular when it was open source, without a company-face behind it. It's a classic example, how some company do it. If Nginx would have been Pro-supported from the start Nginx would never got that much traction. It's just sad, as server status is a bare essential feature, that all competitors offer for free, yet with Nginx one would have to pay $2,500/year/server to get it (plus running a binary blob with useless additional features instead open source edition). I don't get why parent got down-voted. He is absolutely right. What's wrong with the confused downvoters?
  - izietto 10y ago
    Nginx Pro enthusiasts / company owners I guess
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    nginx pro has been around for longer than nginx has been popular, so no.
    - frik 10y ago
      Wrong. First the company only offered professional support. Nginx was completely open source. Look at the website how it looked like in 2012: https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20120603095936/http://nginx.com:80/prod.html https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20120603095936/http://nginx...
      - scrollaway 10y ago
        NGINX Plus has been around since at least 2014 if not longer. Your theory makes no sense, the server has been rising in popularity even faster since. AFAIK the Plus version is just not something people care about but its also never had any impact on the open source one. And as a strong advocate of open source I find it extremely annoying when users find reasons to complain about friendly models for monetization of such software. :/
  - thresh 10y ago
    It's not like nginx-the-company and nginx-the-opensource-project are different people. It's not that "some company" just overtook the project and now is milking the users.
user5994461 10y ago
Agreed. nginx stripped all status pages and informations from the open source edition. You gotta pay $1900 per server to get nginx plus. It makes it impossible to track issues when you cannot see what servers are online or offline and what's going on. I'd recommend to forbid using nginx for load balancing at your companies, only use HaProxy.
- matt4077 10y ago
  Alternatively, if your company is in the position to do so, maybe advocate for buying the license. I feel they chose rather well with status pages–it's a feature that's useful, yet leaving it out doesn't cripple the OSS version in most use cases.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    It cripples the OSS version in every possible use case. I don't think you realize how important are status pages. That's like the single most important feature in a load balancer, after the load balancing itself. You cannot perform any troubleshooting without it. You cannot see servers which are online or offline. You can't see what or how many users are online and where. You can't have statistics, bandwidth, connections, health checks... nginx is a black box. Paying for nginx is a short term solution that causes more troubles. Next you have to count licenses and distribute license keys and use the paid installer from a special source. The long term solution is to ban nginx and use HaProxy instead, same stuff without paywalled features. If I want to put money on something, it's going to F5 or NetScaler, or ELB, or Google load balancers, or Akamai, or Cloudflare. Not nginx.
    - tangent128 10y ago
      "every possible use case" is a bit of hyperbole; there are plenty of non-load-balancer use-cases for nginx. Serving static files, relaying RTMP streams, and running OpenResty applications, for example. But if load balancing is your killer feature, maybe it is the wrong choice.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gshulegaard 10y ago
Have you heard of NGINX Amplify? https://www.nginx.com/amplify/ https://www.nginx.com/amplify/ The agent is open source and available here: https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-amplify-agent https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-amplify-agent If you have a minute, could you give it a try and provide some feedback via Intercom in our UI? User feedback is useful for driving feature as well as product directions. Disclaimer: I work at NGINX on the Amplify project.
- frik 10y ago
  It's does access the same thing I mentioned, see stub_status (open source, yet you have to include header and build it yourself) vs plus_status (paid, $2500/year/server): https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-amplify-agent/blob/master/amplify/agent/collectors/nginx/metrics.py https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-amplify-agent/blob/master/... It would be a good move to open up the status module (release it as open source), and promote such a SaaS analytics product based on it with some error log scanning (like you try to do).
vacri 10y ago
> You get only so much with "ngx_http_stub_status_module" that you have to compile in yourself, as distros don't compile it in Debian compiles it in, so a lot of things that base of Debian would have it as well.

by frik 10y ago

LinuxFreedom 10y ago

It does not make any sense to complain. The constructive approach that lead us to open source world domination goes like this: just build what you need. Start today, publish early, others will chime in and you will have the best status module you could dream of.

daenney 10y ago

> Why isn't there a CentOS-style distro apt/rpm package of Nginx (think of free RedHat) with the status module enabled, as based on open source Nginx? The code of ngx_http_status_module isn't open source (as far as I know). Getting access to it means you need an Nginx Plus license. Someone packaging that up and distributing it for free would be a rather big violation.

simonw 10y ago

This is the classic downside of open source that's supported by a "pro" edition: it encourages maintainers to actively avoid adding features that would compete with the paid product.

inopinatus 10y ago
This is similar to the classic blunder by service product strategists who tier pricing by both capability and scale, rather than one or the other. This results in nonselection of the product rather than the hoped-for upsell.
- exhilaration 10y ago
  "Nonselection"? Did you see the HN post a few days ago [1] about Nginx reaching 33% market share? They seem to be doing very well. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14078589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14078589
  - user5994461 10y ago
    It's simply replacing Apache that is old and deprecated. Nothing fancy.
  - inopinatus 10y ago
    Markets are measured in dollars, not usage. The last press release I read from Nginx* says they have barely more than 1,000 paying customers, and shied away from real revenue numbers, but I doubt anyone would place a bet that it is on the order of magnitude of revenues due to e.g. IIS on Windows Server, or even the revenues that Oracle & IBM collect for their rebadged Apache. * https://www.nginx.com/press/nginx-carries-strong-business-momentum-2017/ https://www.nginx.com/press/nginx-carries-strong-business-mo...
- toufka 10y ago
  Curious - for us non-strategists could you give another sentence explaining your thought here. I don't quite get why scaling both would prevent a sale - but it appears like hard-earned insight.
  - inopinatus 10y ago
    Sure. And yes it is. Bear in mind my perspective is mostly SaaS B2B. Two perspectives on this: 1. Some of my smallest customers are actually lighthouse customers for the rest of their industry. When they can't afford a price-segmented "enterprise" feature then I miss out on their super valuable product feedback and word-of-mouth. I've seen this pattern in sport, telecoms, public transport, k-12 education. About the only place I haven't seen it is the financial sector. I have been both the customer missing out and the provider in this scenario. 2. If a large enterprise is prepared to buy many units, but won't use your high end features, they can just pay for the cheaper end unit. You likely just missed out on revenue. They may well have been interested in later adoption of your more sophisticated stuff, but because they bought the cheap product it'll never happen because at scale the cost step function of going up a tier is perceived super negatively. So you also miss out on feature adoption and product feedback. I have only been the customer in this scenario. I have seen it in both the financial sector and government. It almost happens in healthcare, but they are easily manipulated into higher price segments by placing HIPAA compliance stuff there. NB: Personally I find that kind of manipulation to be toxically abhorrent and when I've been the customer used it as a red flag against doing business. Nonetheless it is common. Overall- To me, business strategy is all about the creation and capture of value. When you find a product model that creates a virtuous cycle between those two aspects of value, you likely have a winner. The best example I can give validating my experience is AWS, where everyone can use everything on a pay-as-you-go basis. I have been both a customer and on the inside with AWS. The model is incredibly empowering for startups having access to this massive box of capability, and moreover enables enterprises to do long-term planning of feature adoption with price stability. The only time I recommend charging more for an enterprise feature is because it costs you significantly more to deliver it and there is no other way to capture your share of the value created or use scale to drive down the marginal cost of delivery. A wise PM will want to separate that out into a separate product. A classic example is providing a TAM over and above your hopefully already universally excellent support desk. The counter-example to this point of view might be Slack. I cannot fathom why they both tier their capabilities and then charge per seat. Hard to see how SSO and AD sync adds to marginal cost per customer seat, and the storage and uptime promises are similarly paper thin value adds. It is one of the reasons I never recommend them. Yet they are apparently successful, perhaps because their product is crack for dev teams. So execution certainly still matters. And no doubt other counter-examples can be easily found. But if you want to maximise your market engagement, it is essential to know how your customers behave in the product selection process in response to the signals you give them. Sorry that was more than one sentence. I was waiting for a compile.
frik 10y ago
True. Nginx got very popular when it was open source, without a company-face behind it. It's a classic example, how some company do it. If Nginx would have been Pro-supported from the start Nginx would never got that much traction. It's just sad, as server status is a bare essential feature, that all competitors offer for free, yet with Nginx one would have to pay $2,500/year/server to get it (plus running a binary blob with useless additional features instead open source edition). I don't get why parent got down-voted. He is absolutely right. What's wrong with the confused downvoters?
- izietto 10y ago
  Nginx Pro enthusiasts / company owners I guess
- scrollaway 10y ago
  nginx pro has been around for longer than nginx has been popular, so no.
  - frik 10y ago
    Wrong. First the company only offered professional support. Nginx was completely open source. Look at the website how it looked like in 2012: https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20120603095936/http://nginx.com:80/prod.html https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20120603095936/http://nginx...
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      NGINX Plus has been around since at least 2014 if not longer. Your theory makes no sense, the server has been rising in popularity even faster since. AFAIK the Plus version is just not something people care about but its also never had any impact on the open source one. And as a strong advocate of open source I find it extremely annoying when users find reasons to complain about friendly models for monetization of such software. :/
- thresh 10y ago
  It's not like nginx-the-company and nginx-the-opensource-project are different people. It's not that "some company" just overtook the project and now is milking the users.

user5994461 10y ago

Agreed. nginx stripped all status pages and informations from the open source edition. You gotta pay $1900 per server to get nginx plus. It makes it impossible to track issues when you cannot see what servers are online or offline and what's going on. I'd recommend to forbid using nginx for load balancing at your companies, only use HaProxy.

matt4077 10y ago
Alternatively, if your company is in the position to do so, maybe advocate for buying the license. I feel they chose rather well with status pages–it's a feature that's useful, yet leaving it out doesn't cripple the OSS version in most use cases.
- user5994461 10y ago
  It cripples the OSS version in every possible use case. I don't think you realize how important are status pages. That's like the single most important feature in a load balancer, after the load balancing itself. You cannot perform any troubleshooting without it. You cannot see servers which are online or offline. You can't see what or how many users are online and where. You can't have statistics, bandwidth, connections, health checks... nginx is a black box. Paying for nginx is a short term solution that causes more troubles. Next you have to count licenses and distribute license keys and use the paid installer from a special source. The long term solution is to ban nginx and use HaProxy instead, same stuff without paywalled features. If I want to put money on something, it's going to F5 or NetScaler, or ELB, or Google load balancers, or Akamai, or Cloudflare. Not nginx.
  - tangent128 10y ago
    "every possible use case" is a bit of hyperbole; there are plenty of non-load-balancer use-cases for nginx. Serving static files, relaying RTMP streams, and running OpenResty applications, for example. But if load balancing is your killer feature, maybe it is the wrong choice.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

gshulegaard 10y ago

Have you heard of NGINX Amplify? https://www.nginx.com/amplify/ https://www.nginx.com/amplify/ The agent is open source and available here: https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-amplify-agent https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-amplify-agent If you have a minute, could you give it a try and provide some feedback via Intercom in our UI? User feedback is useful for driving feature as well as product directions. Disclaimer: I work at NGINX on the Amplify project.

frik 10y ago
It's does access the same thing I mentioned, see stub_status (open source, yet you have to include header and build it yourself) vs plus_status (paid, $2500/year/server): https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-amplify-agent/blob/master/amplify/agent/collectors/nginx/metrics.py https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-amplify-agent/blob/master/... It would be a good move to open up the status module (release it as open source), and promote such a SaaS analytics product based on it with some error log scanning (like you try to do).

vacri 10y ago

> You get only so much with "ngx_http_stub_status_module" that you have to compile in yourself, as distros don't compile it in Debian compiles it in, so a lot of things that base of Debian would have it as well.