7 ms·

I don't understand why all these free open source projects are using nginx when it hides so many great features behind the premium option. HAProxy also has a lu

I don't understand why all these free open source projects are using nginx when it hides so many great features behind the premium option. HAProxy also has a lua module and you even has monitoring abilities for free unlike nginx edit: a project like Kong could easily be done with haproxy as far as I know and you can actually monitor your server. https://getkong.org https://getkong.org

viraptor 9y ago
Because you rarely need those premium options. And when you're big enough to need it, you can pay. Sounds like a win-win to me.
newsat13 9y ago
I have been using nginx since forever for all my personal projects. I cannot say I have missed any feature not in opensource edition. In fact, I didn't even know they had a premium edition for a long time. What killer feature do normal projects require that is not in opensource edition?
- SteveNuts 9y ago
  per-vhost metrics is the big one for us. We're not going to pay $2,500 just to get them though. If you enable the stub status, that gives you metrics for the master process and not any of the virtual hosts.
  - lebinh 9y ago
    I wrote something out of our need for better monitoring/metrics for Nginx here: https://luameter.com/ https://luameter.com/ And quite a few people are using it for per-vhost metrics use case just like you said. Also if you prefer something simpler and open source I also wrote this https://github.com/lebinh/ngxtop https://github.com/lebinh/ngxtop
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - user5994461 9y ago
      Second project is a hack that's reading log scripts. That's not comparable to a proper monitoring page and exposing its stats by statsd (or similar) for integration with a real monitoring system. nginx free edition is a black box, hence the criticism.
  - vbtechguy 9y ago
    I've had basic nginx vhost stats in my Centmin Mod LEMP stack installer for ages - not as detailed but works https://centminmod.com/nginx.html#vhoststats https://centminmod.com/nginx.html#vhoststats. Using nginx module https://github.com/vozlt/nginx-module-vts https://github.com/vozlt/nginx-module-vts and TLS v1.3 works fine for me too https://community.centminmod.com/posts/48818/ https://community.centminmod.com/posts/48818/
tomschlick 9y ago
Because Nginx "just works" and I don't think it's a bad thing that they are trying to make a living from all their hard work. Especially when the premium features are mostly stuff that businesses need.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jbergstroem 9y ago
I think its because nginx was (and for most, still is) generational [compared to apache] in terms of core features and ease of configuration. I can see how caddy would be the next alternative though: more – "modern" if you may – features (money quote: built-in letsencrypt) but more importantly even simpler configuration. edit: This is also where your use case makes it easy to see why nginx (or caddy) won't cut it.
- TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
  Neat, thanks for mentioning Caddy [0]. I hadn't heard about it before now, and just from looking over their docs it looks very promising. Their website is superb, with simple explanations of what the tool does and transparent pricing for their paid options. The only thing I'm initially a tiny bit weary about is their claim of it being production ready. Being used by thousands of sites is an amazing feat, but how big are the loads on these sites? Production-ready can mean completely different things depending on what you're building. I think it'd be a nice improvement to see a bit more data backing up that claim. Just from a quick google search it looks like there's a decent number of articles comparing it with nginx, so I guess I"ll stat digging in a bit deeper. [0] https://caddyserver.com https://caddyserver.com
  - mholt 9y ago
    Yeah, "production-ready" is definitely true about Caddy, but I know saying a program is "production-ready" is like saying a program is "secure" -- what does that even mean?? I like to tell people it's production-ready if it's a good fit for your website and workflow. Many people are using Caddy in production. There's so much variance it's hard to pin it down in a simple phrase, so we have to settle with a term that's "good enough", which I think the most fitting is "production-ready." And upfront, I'll say: Careful with chasing benchmarks. They don't transfer well (or at all), and most people (including me) don't know how to run them properly. Just test with your own staging setups and see if it works well enough for what you need. Anyway, thanks for your feedback about the site -- definitely taking it into account.
    - 9y ago
m-p-3 9y ago
So far, my usage never required any of the premium options. And I suppose a corporation can afford to pay those if needed and support the development.
stephenr 9y ago
You clearly aren't a me-too cool kid. Most tech decisions these days seem to be more about cargo culting than actual suitability for the task.
feld 9y ago
You could say the exact same thing about Varnish. In fact I say your money would be better spent on premium Varnish than on premium Nginx.
- felipelemos 9y ago
  But varnish lacks some features like dns-backend-resolution that are essential on modern microservices world.
  - boyter 9y ago
    I keep hearing this as being an issue but when I suggest slinging some money at the guy creating it I never get a response. Apparently its a big enough issue to grumble about but not big enough to front some cash to resolve. I agree though. DNS backend lookups for this would be an excellent thing to add.
    - ruben_varnish 9y ago
      https://docs.varnish-software.com/varnish-cache-plus/vmods/goto/ https://docs.varnish-software.com/varnish-cache-plus/vmods/g... That? Works like a charm. It's available with the on-premise enterprise subscription and on the AWS and Azure clouds as Varnish Plus - Caching Engine: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=263c0208-6a3a-435d-8728-fa2514202fd0 https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=263c020... https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps?search=varnish%20plus&page=1 https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/app... https://www.varnish-software.com/pricing/varnish-plus/ https://www.varnish-software.com/pricing/varnish-plus/
  - feld 9y ago
    I'm not entirely sure what this is about. Are you saying the list of backends is dynamic and retrieved from DNS? Why would you do this? Why are the backends changing so frequently? This seems like a major design issue. Why not have one backend that's anycasted with equal priority and you can pop backends in and out as you please? Also, why wouldn't you just solve this with SRV records? Just patch Varnish to support SRV properly and magic you get everything you ever wanted including failover and priorities. That's probably a more sane request.
JTenerife 9y ago
Informations about HAProxy on multi-core hardware (TLS de- and encryption are CPU bound) are a bit discouraging. You can assign workers to cores, but there's no shared memory and therefore the official docs warn about some inconsistencies that might occur. There doesn't seem to be a consensus wether to use the multi-core feature or not. Also nginx supports http/2. Regarding the status of the backendservers - I use monitoring with health checks for every backend server anyway. That are the reasons I chose nginx as reverse proxy recently.
- jonathanoliver 9y ago
  We've had great success with HAProxy on multi-core without the warnings. The Stack Exchange operations did a blog post about an easy way to do it. Here's a sample config that does multi-core processing really well: https://gist.github.com/joliver/40291313605971545a0c1f6a3040d4c3 https://gist.github.com/joliver/40291313605971545a0c1f6a3040...
  - doubleplusgood 9y ago
    Does the stats endpoint reflect stats for all processes?
    - jonathanoliver 9y ago
      Yes, it aggregates stats for all endpoints.
      - doubleplusgood 9y ago
        Perhaps I mis-remembered that it would only work for one of them. Haven't used HAProxy in a while.
- codinghorror 9y ago
  Lack of http/2 on haproxy by now is terribly limiting and very disappointing.
paulddraper 9y ago
Nginx is more a web server. HAProxy is more a proxy/load balancer. Those feature sets overlap, but HAProxy cannot serve files, cannot cache. OTHO, most Nginx load balancer features are premium. Overall, I'd say Nginx has a broader range of features and friendlier configuration. Hence high adoption. Anyone using HAProxy is serious about load balancing.
- sethhochberg 9y ago
  For us at $day_job, consistency was also a nice bonus (we recently moved our web load balancers from Varnish to nginx plus, because now we have a single software package which does our SSL termination with HTTP/2, HTTP / TCP / UDP load balancing, serves static assets, caches, and is also the host for our application server itself, Passenger). Of course all of these functions happen across dozens of servers, but we get to use a single config syntax to make all of that happen and only need to track security issues, etc, for a single package. Sure, we could accomplish all of that with some combination of haproxy and/or varnish and/or apache and/or nginx and/or various Ruby/Rack app servers... but we don't have to. Nginx does an acceptably good job of all of those things for our needs right now, and the support they provide for the license cost is pretty reasonable.
nodesocket 9y ago
I am more than willing to pay for NGINX Plus. It supports the authors and company that provides this amazing software. Expecting everything for free and open source is what I despise about the software industry. This anti-capitalist mentality causes great companies with amazing products to go out of business (see RethinkDB) and then everybody both entrepreneurs and developers lose. Slava > And our users clearly thought of us as an open-source developer tools company, because that’s what we really were. Which turned out to be very unfortunate, because the open-source developer tools market is one of the worst markets one could possibly end up in. Thousands of people used RethinkDB, often in business contexts, but most were willing to pay less for the lifetime of usage than the price of a single Starbucks coffee (which is to say, they weren’t willing to pay anything at all).
- sandGorgon 9y ago
  I wish there was a paid version without the heavy duty support cost built into it . The pricing scale up is massive. The cost of a single license in the lowest paid tier is 2500$. I understand it's because of the support cost - but it makes the adoption very hard. You cannot go from 0$ to 10,000$ overnight. And that's the problem.
  - susi22 9y ago
    That's why I'm pretty excited about what agentzh bring to the table with the commercialization (just a few weeks old) of OpenResty Inc.
    - walterbell 9y ago
      Are they going to compete with Nginx premium features? From http://openresty.org http://openresty.org: > OpenResty® is not an Nginx fork. It is just a software bundle. Most of the patches applied to the Nginx core in OpenResty® have already been submitted to the official Nginx team and most of the patches submitted have also been accepted. We are trying hard not to fork Nginx and always to use the latest best Nginx core from the official Nginx team.
kev009 9y ago
nginx is nearly optimal for content serving (see Netflix presentations) and TLS origination or termination. It's actually somewhat weak in the features they charge for.
throw2016 9y ago
I agree with you in principle, ideally there should be no feature separation but supported versions. But given the current culture of even large profitable companies just using open source projects without giving back - see the HN story about Github and Redis - and let alone contributing but even giving credit, some open source companies have no way to earn any revenue. They may then have to resort to this to support their development which ultimately benefits all users. Nginx is a highly regarded, widely used and high performance web server. As a long time user I would not grudge them trying to make some money to support and improve the project. As is Haproxy. I think there is room to accommodate both models and we are just incredibly lucky to have 2 such high performance projects available as open source.
jnsaff2 9y ago
I wanted to like HAproxy but the lack of support for in-place zero downtime config reloads without resorting to witchcraft was a showstopper. Use case for us a service discovery load balancer for Mesos/Marathon where frontend/backend config can change as often as every few seconds. Never had any issues with nginx.
- kawsper 9y ago
  Could you elaborate on how you use Nginx as a service discovery load balancer?
  - jnsaff2 9y ago
    I think most of the ideas are presented here: https://github.com/martensson/nixy https://github.com/martensson/nixy In essence there is a wrapper that: - reads service information and current backend instances out of service catalog (either Marathon or Consul) - writes nginx configuration - runs nginx configtest - tells nginx to reload its configuration Nixy referenced above takes service information directly from Marathon event stream but I usually have Consul so I use homebaked consul-template + nginx solution.
- user5994461 9y ago
  >> where frontend/backend config can change as often as every few seconds That's a red flag. Don't make architectures where you depend on crazy requirements like that.
  - jnsaff2 9y ago
    Ok, I will go tell the 200 or so developers that they can only deploy to test/staging once an hour or so instead of, like .. whenever they need. This is a PaaS supporting many micro-services. There is a hold-off to not reload more than once a second just as an insurance against runaway processes but beyond that nginx handles this without any sweat. Frequent reloads are currently in the non-prod cluster only but I don't see any reason why it would be an issue in prod as well.
therealmarv 9y ago
When it is so easy to do in haproxy why nobody has done it? (which proofs it's not so easy)
coldtea 9y ago
>I don't understand why all these free open source projects are using nginx when it hides so many great features behind the premium option. Because the free version covers all the things they need, and they feel nginx creators also have a right to make some bucks?
jimktrains2 9y ago
nginx can do a lot more than HAProxy. Don't get me wrong, for what it does HAProxy is fast, stable, and wonderful, but it's not a cgi or page server.
ptman 9y ago
There exists Tengine, a fork of nginx, which IIRC features some of nginx paid features for free. I wonder how closely it tracks nginx and what the differences are http://tengine.taobao.org/ http://tengine.taobao.org/ https://github.com/alibaba/tengine https://github.com/alibaba/tengine

viraptor 9y ago

Because you rarely need those premium options. And when you're big enough to need it, you can pay. Sounds like a win-win to me.

newsat13 9y ago

I have been using nginx since forever for all my personal projects. I cannot say I have missed any feature not in opensource edition. In fact, I didn't even know they had a premium edition for a long time. What killer feature do normal projects require that is not in opensource edition?

SteveNuts 9y ago
per-vhost metrics is the big one for us. We're not going to pay $2,500 just to get them though. If you enable the stub status, that gives you metrics for the master process and not any of the virtual hosts.
- lebinh 9y ago
  I wrote something out of our need for better monitoring/metrics for Nginx here: https://luameter.com/ https://luameter.com/ And quite a few people are using it for per-vhost metrics use case just like you said. Also if you prefer something simpler and open source I also wrote this https://github.com/lebinh/ngxtop https://github.com/lebinh/ngxtop
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - user5994461 9y ago
    Second project is a hack that's reading log scripts. That's not comparable to a proper monitoring page and exposing its stats by statsd (or similar) for integration with a real monitoring system. nginx free edition is a black box, hence the criticism.
- vbtechguy 9y ago
  I've had basic nginx vhost stats in my Centmin Mod LEMP stack installer for ages - not as detailed but works https://centminmod.com/nginx.html#vhoststats https://centminmod.com/nginx.html#vhoststats. Using nginx module https://github.com/vozlt/nginx-module-vts https://github.com/vozlt/nginx-module-vts and TLS v1.3 works fine for me too https://community.centminmod.com/posts/48818/ https://community.centminmod.com/posts/48818/

tomschlick 9y ago

Because Nginx "just works" and I don't think it's a bad thing that they are trying to make a living from all their hard work. Especially when the premium features are mostly stuff that businesses need.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jbergstroem 9y ago

I think its because nginx was (and for most, still is) generational [compared to apache] in terms of core features and ease of configuration. I can see how caddy would be the next alternative though: more – "modern" if you may – features (money quote: built-in letsencrypt) but more importantly even simpler configuration. edit: This is also where your use case makes it easy to see why nginx (or caddy) won't cut it.

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
Neat, thanks for mentioning Caddy [0]. I hadn't heard about it before now, and just from looking over their docs it looks very promising. Their website is superb, with simple explanations of what the tool does and transparent pricing for their paid options. The only thing I'm initially a tiny bit weary about is their claim of it being production ready. Being used by thousands of sites is an amazing feat, but how big are the loads on these sites? Production-ready can mean completely different things depending on what you're building. I think it'd be a nice improvement to see a bit more data backing up that claim. Just from a quick google search it looks like there's a decent number of articles comparing it with nginx, so I guess I"ll stat digging in a bit deeper. [0] https://caddyserver.com https://caddyserver.com
- mholt 9y ago
  Yeah, "production-ready" is definitely true about Caddy, but I know saying a program is "production-ready" is like saying a program is "secure" -- what does that even mean?? I like to tell people it's production-ready if it's a good fit for your website and workflow. Many people are using Caddy in production. There's so much variance it's hard to pin it down in a simple phrase, so we have to settle with a term that's "good enough", which I think the most fitting is "production-ready." And upfront, I'll say: Careful with chasing benchmarks. They don't transfer well (or at all), and most people (including me) don't know how to run them properly. Just test with your own staging setups and see if it works well enough for what you need. Anyway, thanks for your feedback about the site -- definitely taking it into account.
  - 9y ago

m-p-3 9y ago

So far, my usage never required any of the premium options. And I suppose a corporation can afford to pay those if needed and support the development.

stephenr 9y ago

You clearly aren't a me-too cool kid. Most tech decisions these days seem to be more about cargo culting than actual suitability for the task.

feld 9y ago

You could say the exact same thing about Varnish. In fact I say your money would be better spent on premium Varnish than on premium Nginx.

felipelemos 9y ago
But varnish lacks some features like dns-backend-resolution that are essential on modern microservices world.
- boyter 9y ago
  I keep hearing this as being an issue but when I suggest slinging some money at the guy creating it I never get a response. Apparently its a big enough issue to grumble about but not big enough to front some cash to resolve. I agree though. DNS backend lookups for this would be an excellent thing to add.
  - ruben_varnish 9y ago
    https://docs.varnish-software.com/varnish-cache-plus/vmods/goto/ https://docs.varnish-software.com/varnish-cache-plus/vmods/g... That? Works like a charm. It's available with the on-premise enterprise subscription and on the AWS and Azure clouds as Varnish Plus - Caching Engine: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=263c0208-6a3a-435d-8728-fa2514202fd0 https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=263c020... https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps?search=varnish%20plus&page=1 https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/app... https://www.varnish-software.com/pricing/varnish-plus/ https://www.varnish-software.com/pricing/varnish-plus/
- feld 9y ago
  I'm not entirely sure what this is about. Are you saying the list of backends is dynamic and retrieved from DNS? Why would you do this? Why are the backends changing so frequently? This seems like a major design issue. Why not have one backend that's anycasted with equal priority and you can pop backends in and out as you please? Also, why wouldn't you just solve this with SRV records? Just patch Varnish to support SRV properly and magic you get everything you ever wanted including failover and priorities. That's probably a more sane request.

JTenerife 9y ago

Informations about HAProxy on multi-core hardware (TLS de- and encryption are CPU bound) are a bit discouraging. You can assign workers to cores, but there's no shared memory and therefore the official docs warn about some inconsistencies that might occur. There doesn't seem to be a consensus wether to use the multi-core feature or not. Also nginx supports http/2. Regarding the status of the backendservers - I use monitoring with health checks for every backend server anyway. That are the reasons I chose nginx as reverse proxy recently.

jonathanoliver 9y ago
We've had great success with HAProxy on multi-core without the warnings. The Stack Exchange operations did a blog post about an easy way to do it. Here's a sample config that does multi-core processing really well: https://gist.github.com/joliver/40291313605971545a0c1f6a3040d4c3 https://gist.github.com/joliver/40291313605971545a0c1f6a3040...
- doubleplusgood 9y ago
  Does the stats endpoint reflect stats for all processes?
  - jonathanoliver 9y ago
    Yes, it aggregates stats for all endpoints.
    - doubleplusgood 9y ago
      Perhaps I mis-remembered that it would only work for one of them. Haven't used HAProxy in a while.
codinghorror 9y ago
Lack of http/2 on haproxy by now is terribly limiting and very disappointing.

paulddraper 9y ago

Nginx is more a web server. HAProxy is more a proxy/load balancer. Those feature sets overlap, but HAProxy cannot serve files, cannot cache. OTHO, most Nginx load balancer features are premium. Overall, I'd say Nginx has a broader range of features and friendlier configuration. Hence high adoption. Anyone using HAProxy is serious about load balancing.

sethhochberg 9y ago
For us at $day_job, consistency was also a nice bonus (we recently moved our web load balancers from Varnish to nginx plus, because now we have a single software package which does our SSL termination with HTTP/2, HTTP / TCP / UDP load balancing, serves static assets, caches, and is also the host for our application server itself, Passenger). Of course all of these functions happen across dozens of servers, but we get to use a single config syntax to make all of that happen and only need to track security issues, etc, for a single package. Sure, we could accomplish all of that with some combination of haproxy and/or varnish and/or apache and/or nginx and/or various Ruby/Rack app servers... but we don't have to. Nginx does an acceptably good job of all of those things for our needs right now, and the support they provide for the license cost is pretty reasonable.

nodesocket 9y ago

I am more than willing to pay for NGINX Plus. It supports the authors and company that provides this amazing software. Expecting everything for free and open source is what I despise about the software industry. This anti-capitalist mentality causes great companies with amazing products to go out of business (see RethinkDB) and then everybody both entrepreneurs and developers lose. Slava > And our users clearly thought of us as an open-source developer tools company, because that’s what we really were. Which turned out to be very unfortunate, because the open-source developer tools market is one of the worst markets one could possibly end up in. Thousands of people used RethinkDB, often in business contexts, but most were willing to pay less for the lifetime of usage than the price of a single Starbucks coffee (which is to say, they weren’t willing to pay anything at all).

sandGorgon 9y ago
I wish there was a paid version without the heavy duty support cost built into it . The pricing scale up is massive. The cost of a single license in the lowest paid tier is 2500$. I understand it's because of the support cost - but it makes the adoption very hard. You cannot go from 0$ to 10,000$ overnight. And that's the problem.
- susi22 9y ago
  That's why I'm pretty excited about what agentzh bring to the table with the commercialization (just a few weeks old) of OpenResty Inc.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    Are they going to compete with Nginx premium features? From http://openresty.org http://openresty.org: > OpenResty® is not an Nginx fork. It is just a software bundle. Most of the patches applied to the Nginx core in OpenResty® have already been submitted to the official Nginx team and most of the patches submitted have also been accepted. We are trying hard not to fork Nginx and always to use the latest best Nginx core from the official Nginx team.

kev009 9y ago

nginx is nearly optimal for content serving (see Netflix presentations) and TLS origination or termination. It's actually somewhat weak in the features they charge for.

throw2016 9y ago

I agree with you in principle, ideally there should be no feature separation but supported versions. But given the current culture of even large profitable companies just using open source projects without giving back - see the HN story about Github and Redis - and let alone contributing but even giving credit, some open source companies have no way to earn any revenue. They may then have to resort to this to support their development which ultimately benefits all users. Nginx is a highly regarded, widely used and high performance web server. As a long time user I would not grudge them trying to make some money to support and improve the project. As is Haproxy. I think there is room to accommodate both models and we are just incredibly lucky to have 2 such high performance projects available as open source.

jnsaff2 9y ago

I wanted to like HAproxy but the lack of support for in-place zero downtime config reloads without resorting to witchcraft was a showstopper. Use case for us a service discovery load balancer for Mesos/Marathon where frontend/backend config can change as often as every few seconds. Never had any issues with nginx.

kawsper 9y ago
Could you elaborate on how you use Nginx as a service discovery load balancer?
- jnsaff2 9y ago
  I think most of the ideas are presented here: https://github.com/martensson/nixy https://github.com/martensson/nixy In essence there is a wrapper that: - reads service information and current backend instances out of service catalog (either Marathon or Consul) - writes nginx configuration - runs nginx configtest - tells nginx to reload its configuration Nixy referenced above takes service information directly from Marathon event stream but I usually have Consul so I use homebaked consul-template + nginx solution.
user5994461 9y ago
>> where frontend/backend config can change as often as every few seconds That's a red flag. Don't make architectures where you depend on crazy requirements like that.
- jnsaff2 9y ago
  Ok, I will go tell the 200 or so developers that they can only deploy to test/staging once an hour or so instead of, like .. whenever they need. This is a PaaS supporting many micro-services. There is a hold-off to not reload more than once a second just as an insurance against runaway processes but beyond that nginx handles this without any sweat. Frequent reloads are currently in the non-prod cluster only but I don't see any reason why it would be an issue in prod as well.

therealmarv 9y ago

When it is so easy to do in haproxy why nobody has done it? (which proofs it's not so easy)

coldtea 9y ago

>I don't understand why all these free open source projects are using nginx when it hides so many great features behind the premium option. Because the free version covers all the things they need, and they feel nginx creators also have a right to make some bucks?

jimktrains2 9y ago

nginx can do a lot more than HAProxy. Don't get me wrong, for what it does HAProxy is fast, stable, and wonderful, but it's not a cgi or page server.

ptman 9y ago

There exists Tengine, a fork of nginx, which IIRC features some of nginx paid features for free. I wonder how closely it tracks nginx and what the differences are http://tengine.taobao.org/ http://tengine.taobao.org/ https://github.com/alibaba/tengine https://github.com/alibaba/tengine