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Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

1057 points by eduren 8y ago

benfortuna 8y ago
In what world is NGINX worth so much less than WhatsApp, Snapchat, and some other sites of dubious value? The world of economists has no idea how to value technology beyond narrow ad-based business models.
eduren 8y ago
F5 side of the press release: https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-nginx-to-bridge-netops-devops https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-n...
snissn 8y ago
congrats Nginx team! i've gotten lots of value out of your product
jandeboevrie 8y ago
Seems to be too early for an April fool's joke :(
raiyu 8y ago
With everything that is going on with open source licensing this certainly can create a bit of worry down the line. Interesting to also see what aws is doing in response to some of the more complicated licensing agreements and specifically elastic search: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-open-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-... The challenge for nginx was they raised VC capital so they were in a forcing function. Either grow revenue or get acquired. Could have remained an independent oss product for ever but alas no more.
- imglorp 8y ago
  Could this simply be about losing hardware sales to this newfangled open source? A big F5 rig used to go for $175k, vs $30k-sh for an nginx on plain hardware. https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-plus-vs-f5-big-ip-a-price-performance-comparison/ https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-plus-vs-f5-big-ip-a-price-p...
  - X-Istence 8y ago
    A big F5 rig is basically Linux with a CLI/admin interface on top.
    - joshAg 8y ago
      It's way more than that. Yeah the base OS on the machine is Linux, but there's a lot of extra stuff they do all the way down to the hardware layer.
      - rhacker 8y ago
        So what does the likes of AWS (for example) use for load balancing for data coming into its various private clouds... f5s?
        ikiris 8y ago
        the short version is "magic". The long version is, "varying degrees of horror"
        kevan 8y ago
        This article provides some info: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-web-services-secret-weapon-custom-made-hardware-network/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-web-services-secret-wea...
        ignoramous 8y ago
        Here's the ever excellent Eric Brandwine explaining what AWS does at L3 wrt VPC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qln2u1Vr2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qln2u1Vr2E Here's the super versatile Colm Mac explaining what AWS does at L4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gc2DgBqo9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gc2DgBqo9U --- Google has been very open about their network infrastructure, here's a nice summary from 2015: https://ai.googleblog.com/2015/08/pulling-back-curtain-on-googles-network.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2015/08/pulling-back-curtain-on-go... and not mentioned in that blog... their NetworkLoadBalancer, Maglev: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-shares-software-network-load-balancer-design-powering-gcp-networking https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-shares-sof... (AWS equivalent of which would be HyperPlane: https://atscaleconference.com/videos/networking-scale-2018-load-balancing-at-hyperscale/ https://atscaleconference.com/videos/networking-scale-2018-l... allegedly based on S3's load balancer).
- mistrial9 8y ago
  > everything that is going on with open source licensing.. when visiting Taiwan and then Hong Kong in the late 1990's, a local said "there are no software companies here" .. everything with money had a hardware sale associated, software was just pirated as much as possible, end of story.. no one would pay for software if they did not have to.. It may be a "western" thing to have companies and people that can live from writing only software
  - pkaye 8y ago
    It's also why software as a service has become common everywhere. Like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office. It's harder to pirate plus ongoing revenues.
- ktjfi 8y ago
  >With everything that is going on with open source licensing What exactly is going on with open source licencing? Is anybody violating open source licences?
tootie 8y ago
Interesting move. Big IP is a hell of a product on it's own. Curious to see how they add nginx to their product line and what this means for open source usage.
ClassAndBurn 8y ago
Nginx is an incredible product. I've used it at nearly every company I've been at and on multiple occasions its entirely saved us both via its capabilities and its accessible, robust documentation that we had to read at 2 AM while fire fighting. Congrats to the team on a hard fought journey.
clinta 8y ago
I'm nervous about what this means for the future of nginx's built in load balancing. That's been an important and rock-solid part of my infrastructure.
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  I would not be worried unless F5 have stated they are going to change licensing. Haproxy have a commercial version of their software, including appliances. Several other open source projects have commercially supported versions. NGinx has had a commercial version of their code for a long time. Now it will be under new management. I could see the branding for the commercial version of nginx change.
- jsight 8y ago
  Not to mention the nginx waf product.
- bloopernova 8y ago
  I too am worried about this. Thankfully F5 can't just disappear the open source nginx.
  - enahs-sf 8y ago
    I'm still downloading the repo and a few versions just in case.
- s_kilk 8y ago
  Throwing out a question to the room: if the worst happens and Nginx gets butchered, would it be so bad to go back to using Apache? I've never used it really, everything I've done has been Nginx, but is there some technical reason why Apache wouldn't be a fine fallback option for an open-source server?
  - e1ven 8y ago
    If you like nginx, why would you fall back to apache instead of forking it, or using one of the many existing forks? That's one of the best parts of OSS code - You don't just have to follow them to the next version they release. (One example is Tengine - It is really nicely setup and a lot of people prefer it to core nginx already)
miguelmota 8y ago
Acquired for $670 million https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-nginx-to-bridge-netops-devops https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-n...
- shereadsthenews 8y ago
  Cash, apparently. I like how Wilson Sonsini advised F5 in the purchase while firm heir Peter Sonsini invested in Nginx corp. Good times for old money in the Valley.
  - StudentStuff 8y ago
    I thought F5 was primarily a Seattle based company? I've known more F5 employees growing up in Seattle than Amazon employees at least. On another note, F5's poorly written code is the reason TLS 1.0 is considered insecure (using a variant of the POODLE attack), among other major security lapses.
    - mlindner 8y ago
      F5 has a few hundred person office in San Jose as well as a decent amount in Tel Aviv as well.
      - shereadsthenews 8y ago
        Sure but it's not engineers who are getting paid in this deal, it's VCs and lawyers.
    - kayfox 8y ago
      POODLE was also an issue with other ADC vendors, I think it links back to where those ADC vendors got their initial TLS code, how the industry went about implementing it, etc.
  - person_of_color 8y ago
    How does a random person become part of this scene?
astrodust 8y ago
Yeah, well, that was fun while it lasted.
chx 8y ago
"F5 is committed to continued innovation and increasing investment in the NGINX open source project to empower NGINX’s widespread user communities." from https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-nginx-to-bridge-netops-devops https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-n... what do we know of F5 history in open source?
- raiyu 8y ago
  I think the issue is that there isn't much and certainly nginx could be viewed as competitor to F5. And with everything else going on it's not difficult to imagine that this acquisition isn't a positive sign.
  - jfindley 8y ago
    Could it, really? I know that nginx has some builtin load balancing, but unless it's vastly vastly changed in the past few years, it's still a LONG way behind haproxy for load balancing. nginx is an excellent high performance webserver, which is something F5 don't really have. It is (or was, at least) at best a mediocre load balancer, with all sorts of limitations at the sort of scales you'd usually use an F5 box for. While it's probably fair to wonder how much more work will be put into the LB feature-set of nginx, I hope that this will be counterbalanced by increased funding for the core feature of being a superlative webserver.
    - greglindahl 8y ago
      nginx's worse-than-F5-and-haproxy load balancing was great for where I was using it. And from all reports, F5 would have required a full engineer to do configuration, compared to about 1/4 of an engineer for nginx.
  - LinuxBender 8y ago
    I would suggest that haproxy (which has a commercial version and appliance) are more of a competitor to F5. NGinx is first and foremost a web server with excellent controls around caching. Haproxy is a load balancer with some caching as of version 1.9. F5 has always provided a web server in their load balancer via apache, but that is for management of the device itself. It can also serve up static web pages (primarily meant for error and landing pages).
gigatexal 8y ago
Wow. Huge exit for them. Didn’t see this coming.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
Congratulations to nginx. It could be an acqui-hire or it could be a defensive move by F5.
buryat 8y ago
what are some good alternatives to nginx?
- skrowl 8y ago
  Obviously Apache, IIS https://caddyserver.com/ https://caddyserver.com/ https://www.lighttpd.net/ https://www.lighttpd.net/ https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/ https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/
  - aquabeagle 8y ago
    Probably not that last one... https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/weblog/132 https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/weblog/132
    - jtdev 8y ago
      Or IIS... yikes!
      - skrowl 8y ago
        Not all of us work in small startups. The enterprise needs webservers too!
        fxfan 8y ago
        But Microsoft bad, everybody say so
- tomohawk 8y ago
  Depending on what you're doing, haproxy is usually a better choice than nginx.
  - ddragosd 8y ago
    I've played with both over time, and I was never comfortable with HAProxy's performance.
openloop 8y ago
To support open source like this is really nice.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
hannasanarion 8y ago
In the event that F5 pulls an Oracle and horribly mismanages nginx, runs it into the ground, or tries to close it off, I vote we name the community fork "nginy".
- jldugger 8y ago
  Or perhaps a more us-vs-them fork, maybe something like 'ngin-us' (pronounced 'ingenious')
- sumoboy 8y ago
  Got to feel lucky Oracle or IBM didn't buy them, definitely would have run them into the ground.
  - seunosewa 8y ago
    People thought Oracle would run MySQL into the ground, and that didn't happen.
    - hannasanarion 8y ago
      That's because Oracle was too busy suing Java users and pissing on OpenSolaris. There's only so many open source projects a company can eradicate at a time.
- petarb 8y ago
  Can’t wait till that forks to “nginz”
- vesche 8y ago
  Or how about "nginext"
  - cprecioso 8y ago
    thank u, nginxt
Theodores 8y ago
F5 Networks - never heard of them. After reading what they do I am not sure whether I should have heard of them.
c0l0 8y ago
I guess that signals it's time for nginx users to check out possible alternatives - just in case, if things turn out for the worse. I can recommend having a look at https://varnish-cache.org/ https://varnish-cache.org/ - while its performance might not be 100% up to par with nginx in some (very, very high-end) scenarios, it has many other fortes that nginx (at least in its FOSS release version; I've never used nginx plus) just cannot match in my experience. Having seen `varnishlog` and `varnishtest` in action alone are worth spending a day or two exploring it.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  Idunno, it seems fine to me. There are plenty of HTTP daemons that get the job done though, and if you have exacting requirements, there's nothing particularly difficult about writing your own specialized one (generally you don't have to write every feature of NGINX).
- dharmab 8y ago
  We've had good experiences with https://www.envoyproxy.io https://www.envoyproxy.io.
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  Then again most nginx users are going to be fine with haproxy/traefik in front of good old apache or lighttpd. Or even just apache.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    I've replaced most of my nginx instances with traefik, except those just serving static files. The configuration is more straightforward and the EncryptIt integration is a lot more elegant than in nginx's case.
  - bovermyer 8y ago
    The last two companies I've worked for used træfik and haproxy, and just this last weekend I converted my home clusters from nginx to træfik. nginx is fine, but there are now other options that work just as well.
yingw787 8y ago
So...what is the future of enterprise open source? Is there a future for enterprise open source? If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. If you mix in proprietary licenses to protect yourself, AWS forks your core, adds in open-source licensed clients, then runs you into the ground (and you lose open-source contributors/supporters as a bonus who may fork your core themselves). I remember from a undergrad class reading Google's system design papers, that they publish only the top-level architecture for core systems they use, and only after 3-5 years of use when they have moved on to a better system. After all this (Docker/Redis/Elastic/Nginx), I think that might be the best path forward. You can provide the benefits of open-source and recognition for the architects, but not lose your competitive advantage. Open-sourcing your core product seems too idealistic.
- MichaelMoser123 8y ago
  can be, I am interviewing quite a bit lately, among start ups there seems to be a renewed interest in doing devices. Probably because it is harder to do the commoditization trick or to re-implement the solution when hardware is involved.
- admax88q 8y ago
  You could AGPL and sell proprietary exceptions. Amazon won't touch AGPL code.
  - ignoramous 8y ago
    Well, most enterprises wouldn't: https://blog.dgraph.io/post/relicensing-dgraph/ https://blog.dgraph.io/post/relicensing-dgraph/
  - sneak 8y ago
    Has the AGPL ever successfully held up in court?
    - sjwright 8y ago
      Surely it doesn't need to—either you accept the license or you don't accept the license. If you don't accept the license, you can't use the software. I'd imagine that the challenge with the AGPL is catching and suing the non-compliant services.
ChikkaChiChi 8y ago
I think this will all be alright. The open source product will continue to support most use cases the same as it always has. Customers with additional needs or edge cases will opt-in for support. The byproduct of that relationship will be to ascertain which users are growing to a point where nginx may not be able to support more mission critical needs, and that's where F5's commercial products can come in. Of course, this also means that you could expect any sort of future development that overlaps with their higher end products to vanish.
hcknews_now 8y ago
Is docker up next? Thoughts?
bouncycastle 8y ago
First time I heard of this company. Their website is in the highest order of marketing speak, but actually offering nothing much. Note to self: security services are a nice way to milk governments & corporations. In any case, I'm glad that Nginx is still available for free and the project will continue to have funding in the future from what looks like a cashed-up company. Besides, if it doesn't work out, it can always be foked. Hooray for open source software!
- Zircom 8y ago
  We use their VPN client at where I work...it's a mess. Disconnects all the time, IF you can even get it to connect in the first place, it like's to sit there for up to 20 minutes sometimes before it finally connects. Almost never works with captive portals, and all sorts of syncing issues with our network drives. To be fair, it might just have to do with our company's implementation, our IT department pretty hit or miss when it comes to implementing new stuff, it only rolled our 6 months ago and we do have 30,000+ employees/contractors so I'd imagine it's headache getting everything just right, but still.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- xnyan 8y ago
  F5 is big in its category (software http "router") in a lot of important industries including finance and healthcare. It's the SSL terminator of choice overall for enterprise environments and is a critical part countless L3 toolchains and workflows.
- black-tea 8y ago
  F5 is your standard enterprise software company that big companies end up using while all employees hate using their products.
tannhaeuser 8y ago
I'm guessing this will upset many devs longing for nginx per default. Personally, I never understood why nginx is so popular with a particular demographic, and have always preferred tried-and-true Apache httpd.
- zokier 8y ago
  nginx had very well performing event driven core from the get-go. Apache event mpm module stabilized only in 2.4, and at that point nginx was already quite popular.
KaiserPro 8y ago
Well it makes sense for F5. Their main buisness, hardware loadbalancing is rapidly diminishing, so buying in NGINX seems like a sensible move. After all, its much easier to sell support to people who are actually _using_ your product.
- laura2013 8y ago
  hey, can you provide a source for their decrease in market share? Or are you assuming based on AWS growth? I tried looking up the Gartner starts but couldn't get past a login.
  - KaiserPro 8y ago
    Sorry based on my own ignorance. In 2014 we had two, then I moved company to where we had 6 loadbalancers, in the four years we were there we killed them off with a mix of AWS and k8s At most recent place, I'd no even consider installing them.
- jlockhardt 8y ago
  F5 is loosing huge customers to a company called Avi networks. F5 employee told me F5 is scared of Avi. Might have been a move to try to compete.
sanguy 8y ago
Really sad. NGINX was the cure to F5 proprietary boxes. Up next is likely HaProxy....
- jlockhardt 8y ago
  We replaced F5 with Avi Networks and we are a global fortune 500.
jlockhardt 8y ago
They probably bought nginx because AVI networks has been winning F5s largest customers away one major logo at a time, and are scrambling to compete. F5 already bought a software load balancer in the past and did nothing with it, so they will once again probably do nothing with NGINX and struggle to build something as usual. I replaced f5 with AVI and know of a number of global companies that have done it as well. Interesting times for the ADC space. Bye bye nginx. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi-Networks-Doubles-Revenue-Customer-Base-Legacy https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi...
mattjaynes 8y ago
I've recently been getting quite a few marketing emails from nginx pushing for replacing F5 with nginx. Just checked and the last one I received was last thursday, March 7th. Interesting how recently nginx was continuing this campaign. I wonder how effective the "replace F5 with NGINX" marketing push was at increasing the price and urgency for the acquisition. For the curious, the big headline at the top of the message was "Modernizing Applications by Replacing F5 with NGINX Application Delivery Controller and Signal Sciences" Then the text of that top section was: "F5’s rigid and centralized approach to load balancing and web application firewall (WAF) prevents enterprises from modernizing their applications. In this recent webinar we describe how replacing or augmenting your F5 deployment with the NGINX application delivery controller and Signal Sciences WAF helps reduce costs and improve agility."
- jlockhardt 8y ago
  NGINX is upset that AVI networks is winning all major the F5 replacement business. I looked at NGINX in the past and the rep seemed hesitant to talk about AVI vs NGINX. Seems to be true. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi-Networks-Doubles-Revenue-Customer-Base-Legacy https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi...
  - gshulegaard 8y ago
    Having worked at NGINX, I would be surprised if Avi Networks was at all a consideration for marketing F5 replacement. When I left (not too long ago), most of our enterprise sales of NGINX+ was for F5 replacement deals...which is why the marketing emphasis has always been on replacing F5. As an engineer (so I can't speak to business strategy), I always thought of Avi Networks as market validation for ancillary software services like Amplify and Controller rather than a competitor with NGINX+. But that was just my thinking.
ksajadi 8y ago
One thing I find interesting in this is the valuation: $670MM which means nginx that powers almost the entire web and has a strong monetization model is not a unicorn while some very questionable businesses are if you ask their VCs.
tyingq 8y ago
I wonder if load balancer and API gateway products might eventually converge. Things like Kong, Tyk and Apigee have caching, embedded scripting, basic load balancing, etc. They aren't as good as Nginx or Haproxy at it, but a single product outside the app would be attractive.
- pull_my_finger 8y ago
  Curious how you think Kong falls short of Nginx. Isn't it built on top of Nginx via Openresty/ngx_lua?
  - fosk 8y ago
    Marco, CTO of Kong here. Kong is not only built on top of Nginx, but also extends it significantly to provide features that Nginx doesn’t do out of the box (dynamic configuration, SRV records resolution, dynamic Plugin based system, data plane API and so on).
  - tyingq 8y ago
    Ah, yes. I was generalizing API gateway load balancing, which doesn't make sense for Kong.
- jimjag 8y ago
  "Things like Kong, Tyk and Apigee have caching, embedded scripting, basic load balancing, etc. " Hmmm... like Apache httpd?
  - tyingq 8y ago
    Well, in addition to API gateway specifics, like API keys, counters, etc.
pretty_titan 8y ago
How can some of you do balancing, but have never heard of F5? Heck, I knew if f5 10 plus years ago. F5 can be fully automated now from top down, plus the additional security aspects are a major plus. Most people that use Nginx, and have some knowledge of load balancing products use both. It’s often called the best of bread, which Nginx and f5 are IMO. Now, a few years ago could you have automated everything? Probably not, but just look at their gitrepo. It’s pretty transparent at what their aiming at.
Ulixes 8y ago
I am using F5 BigIP 5600 for quite some time now. In one line: I hate it! Can’t rename „objects“. You can’t search properly for something in a DataGroups - at least not within the UI. There is just so much that I really hate about that product. I was about to tell my chef about NGINX - well ...
monster2control 8y ago
Terrible news
rocky1138 8y ago
Are we all going to move back to Apache httpd?
- jimjag 8y ago
  Why not? Apache 2.4 with the Event MPM is async and event-driven, just as fast as nginx, lower latency, more fully compliant w/ RFC specs, robust reverse proxy w/ load balancing and dynamic configuration, super-fast caching,... and fully and completely open source.
  - rocky1138 8y ago
    Hey you're preaching to the converted. Tbh I have no idea why we all moved away in the first place. I was fine with Apache.
deanmoriarty 8y ago
Would be curious to know if employees are able to tap into these profits, or if somehow they are getting screwed?
dedalus 8y ago
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/11/f5-acquires-nginx-for-670m-to-move-into-open-source-multi-cloud-services/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/11/f5-acquires-nginx-for-670m... is a much better rationale and details on how it went down
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sexyflanders 8y ago
lol
samstave 8y ago
Man I didnt even realize F5 was still relevant... I recall my first two F5 box purchases... Tore it apart with the engineer installing it for us at Decide.com in ~1999 and each box was ~$35,000 After asking about and being shown what the box was, a low end machine with a custom linux distro with a custom LB logic that was complex... I was really turned off by their implementation.... Dont get me wrong, it was revolutionary as a product and what not - but from an engineer, I was kicking myself as to how much they could charge for the thing.... Now ELBs are "free" for same functionality in cloud... So what is F5 doing - and Who is buying them, aside from governments? (I am not hating on them - trying to understand them)
platform 8y ago
I wonder if Facebook's opensourcing of BPF [1] 4 months ago had negative affects on F5's competitive advantaages. BPF allows to run user code in kernel modules, so things like packet rewriting and traffic shaping are possible. [2] [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18337429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18337429 [2]https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/bpf/docs/bpf-docs#tools-built-on-bpf https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/bpf/docs/bpf-docs#tools...
- _wmd 8y ago
  BPF is 12 years older than Facebook :) People don't buy individual pieces of technology, they want packaged solutions that come with support. Tech almost matters less than good support
Rapzid 8y ago
I was always under the impression nginx was keeping rather basic stuff(like downstream status) out of core so they could sell plus and that the community deserved a better defacto server.. Maybe this will be the catalyst?
purplezooey 8y ago
Wonder how the other shareholders did.
throw2016 8y ago
This is vaguely discomforting but perhaps inevitable in a world where open source is sponsored, funded or developed by corporate interests. The connection with end users and ideology has been broken as everything from the kernel to major projects are corporate funded and driven. And most inadvertently acknowledge this when they raise concerns about the sustainability of projects without financial or corporate backing. The exploding complexity of things like browsers and projects like Systemd make the idea of individuals and smalls team developing alternatives without corporate backing a non stater. Most open source projects in the last 10 years would see this kind of acquisition as an ideal outcome and for vc funded ones a necessary one. Even a 'fork' of Nginx at this time would most likely be driven by commercial motives so the 'vague discomfort' expressed in this comment itself is perhaps misplaced.
evkonst 8y ago
I wonder where that puts Wallarm that sells WAF solutions relying on NGINX and F5's Big IP is a competitor.
norin 8y ago
what happens to A10 now, being in the same market as F5?
raggi 8y ago
Congrats to them. Grateful for the product they open sourced.
Chico11Kidlet 8y ago
I still have hard time believing that commercial merger will result in Nginx remaining available as free and open source without any drawbacks and hidden payments for those requiring fully functional piece of software. Let's see what follows.
k_vinogradov 8y ago
We were one of the first three investors in Nginx in 2011 and just decided to share memories about development of the company thought the eyes of its VC shareholder: https://medium.com/runa-capital-collection/nginx-and-runa-story-6e27e2a4ab5d https://medium.com/runa-capital-collection/nginx-and-runa-st... (from idea in 2002 to exit in 2019)
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
are you fucking kidding? a sellout and a race to the bottom all in the name of dollars fucking pathetic
rivkxbscgs 8y ago
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草泥马

1057 points by eduren 8y ago

In what world is NGINX worth so much less than WhatsApp, Snapchat, and some other sites of dubious value? The world of economists has no idea how to value technology beyond narrow ad-based business models.

eduren 8y ago

F5 side of the press release: https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-nginx-to-bridge-netops-devops https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-n...

snissn 8y ago

congrats Nginx team! i've gotten lots of value out of your product

jandeboevrie 8y ago

Seems to be too early for an April fool's joke :(

raiyu 8y ago

With everything that is going on with open source licensing this certainly can create a bit of worry down the line. Interesting to also see what aws is doing in response to some of the more complicated licensing agreements and specifically elastic search: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-open-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-... The challenge for nginx was they raised VC capital so they were in a forcing function. Either grow revenue or get acquired. Could have remained an independent oss product for ever but alas no more.

imglorp 8y ago
Could this simply be about losing hardware sales to this newfangled open source? A big F5 rig used to go for $175k, vs $30k-sh for an nginx on plain hardware. https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-plus-vs-f5-big-ip-a-price-performance-comparison/ https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-plus-vs-f5-big-ip-a-price-p...
- X-Istence 8y ago
  A big F5 rig is basically Linux with a CLI/admin interface on top.
  - joshAg 8y ago
    It's way more than that. Yeah the base OS on the machine is Linux, but there's a lot of extra stuff they do all the way down to the hardware layer.
    - rhacker 8y ago
      So what does the likes of AWS (for example) use for load balancing for data coming into its various private clouds... f5s?
      - ikiris 8y ago
        the short version is "magic". The long version is, "varying degrees of horror"
      - kevan 8y ago
        This article provides some info: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-web-services-secret-weapon-custom-made-hardware-network/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-web-services-secret-wea...
      - ignoramous 8y ago
        Here's the ever excellent Eric Brandwine explaining what AWS does at L3 wrt VPC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qln2u1Vr2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qln2u1Vr2E Here's the super versatile Colm Mac explaining what AWS does at L4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gc2DgBqo9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gc2DgBqo9U --- Google has been very open about their network infrastructure, here's a nice summary from 2015: https://ai.googleblog.com/2015/08/pulling-back-curtain-on-googles-network.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2015/08/pulling-back-curtain-on-go... and not mentioned in that blog... their NetworkLoadBalancer, Maglev: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-shares-software-network-load-balancer-design-powering-gcp-networking https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-shares-sof... (AWS equivalent of which would be HyperPlane: https://atscaleconference.com/videos/networking-scale-2018-load-balancing-at-hyperscale/ https://atscaleconference.com/videos/networking-scale-2018-l... allegedly based on S3's load balancer).
mistrial9 8y ago
> everything that is going on with open source licensing.. when visiting Taiwan and then Hong Kong in the late 1990's, a local said "there are no software companies here" .. everything with money had a hardware sale associated, software was just pirated as much as possible, end of story.. no one would pay for software if they did not have to.. It may be a "western" thing to have companies and people that can live from writing only software
- pkaye 8y ago
  It's also why software as a service has become common everywhere. Like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office. It's harder to pirate plus ongoing revenues.
ktjfi 8y ago
>With everything that is going on with open source licensing What exactly is going on with open source licencing? Is anybody violating open source licences?

tootie 8y ago

Interesting move. Big IP is a hell of a product on it's own. Curious to see how they add nginx to their product line and what this means for open source usage.

ClassAndBurn 8y ago

Nginx is an incredible product. I've used it at nearly every company I've been at and on multiple occasions its entirely saved us both via its capabilities and its accessible, robust documentation that we had to read at 2 AM while fire fighting. Congrats to the team on a hard fought journey.

clinta 8y ago

I'm nervous about what this means for the future of nginx's built in load balancing. That's been an important and rock-solid part of my infrastructure.

LinuxBender 8y ago
I would not be worried unless F5 have stated they are going to change licensing. Haproxy have a commercial version of their software, including appliances. Several other open source projects have commercially supported versions. NGinx has had a commercial version of their code for a long time. Now it will be under new management. I could see the branding for the commercial version of nginx change.
jsight 8y ago
Not to mention the nginx waf product.
bloopernova 8y ago
I too am worried about this. Thankfully F5 can't just disappear the open source nginx.
- enahs-sf 8y ago
  I'm still downloading the repo and a few versions just in case.
s_kilk 8y ago
Throwing out a question to the room: if the worst happens and Nginx gets butchered, would it be so bad to go back to using Apache? I've never used it really, everything I've done has been Nginx, but is there some technical reason why Apache wouldn't be a fine fallback option for an open-source server?
- e1ven 8y ago
  If you like nginx, why would you fall back to apache instead of forking it, or using one of the many existing forks? That's one of the best parts of OSS code - You don't just have to follow them to the next version they release. (One example is Tengine - It is really nicely setup and a lot of people prefer it to core nginx already)

miguelmota 8y ago

Acquired for $670 million https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-nginx-to-bridge-netops-devops https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-n...

shereadsthenews 8y ago
Cash, apparently. I like how Wilson Sonsini advised F5 in the purchase while firm heir Peter Sonsini invested in Nginx corp. Good times for old money in the Valley.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  I thought F5 was primarily a Seattle based company? I've known more F5 employees growing up in Seattle than Amazon employees at least. On another note, F5's poorly written code is the reason TLS 1.0 is considered insecure (using a variant of the POODLE attack), among other major security lapses.
  - mlindner 8y ago
    F5 has a few hundred person office in San Jose as well as a decent amount in Tel Aviv as well.
    - shereadsthenews 8y ago
      Sure but it's not engineers who are getting paid in this deal, it's VCs and lawyers.
  - kayfox 8y ago
    POODLE was also an issue with other ADC vendors, I think it links back to where those ADC vendors got their initial TLS code, how the industry went about implementing it, etc.
- person_of_color 8y ago
  How does a random person become part of this scene?

astrodust 8y ago

Yeah, well, that was fun while it lasted.

chx 8y ago

"F5 is committed to continued innovation and increasing investment in the NGINX open source project to empower NGINX’s widespread user communities." from https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-nginx-to-bridge-netops-devops https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-n... what do we know of F5 history in open source?

raiyu 8y ago
I think the issue is that there isn't much and certainly nginx could be viewed as competitor to F5. And with everything else going on it's not difficult to imagine that this acquisition isn't a positive sign.
- jfindley 8y ago
  Could it, really? I know that nginx has some builtin load balancing, but unless it's vastly vastly changed in the past few years, it's still a LONG way behind haproxy for load balancing. nginx is an excellent high performance webserver, which is something F5 don't really have. It is (or was, at least) at best a mediocre load balancer, with all sorts of limitations at the sort of scales you'd usually use an F5 box for. While it's probably fair to wonder how much more work will be put into the LB feature-set of nginx, I hope that this will be counterbalanced by increased funding for the core feature of being a superlative webserver.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    nginx's worse-than-F5-and-haproxy load balancing was great for where I was using it. And from all reports, F5 would have required a full engineer to do configuration, compared to about 1/4 of an engineer for nginx.
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  I would suggest that haproxy (which has a commercial version and appliance) are more of a competitor to F5. NGinx is first and foremost a web server with excellent controls around caching. Haproxy is a load balancer with some caching as of version 1.9. F5 has always provided a web server in their load balancer via apache, but that is for management of the device itself. It can also serve up static web pages (primarily meant for error and landing pages).

gigatexal 8y ago

Wow. Huge exit for them. Didn’t see this coming.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

Congratulations to nginx. It could be an acqui-hire or it could be a defensive move by F5.

buryat 8y ago

what are some good alternatives to nginx?

skrowl 8y ago
Obviously Apache, IIS https://caddyserver.com/ https://caddyserver.com/ https://www.lighttpd.net/ https://www.lighttpd.net/ https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/ https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/
- aquabeagle 8y ago
  Probably not that last one... https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/weblog/132 https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/weblog/132
  - jtdev 8y ago
    Or IIS... yikes!
    - skrowl 8y ago
      Not all of us work in small startups. The enterprise needs webservers too!
      - fxfan 8y ago
        But Microsoft bad, everybody say so
tomohawk 8y ago
Depending on what you're doing, haproxy is usually a better choice than nginx.
- ddragosd 8y ago
  I've played with both over time, and I was never comfortable with HAProxy's performance.

openloop 8y ago

To support open source like this is really nice.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

hannasanarion 8y ago

In the event that F5 pulls an Oracle and horribly mismanages nginx, runs it into the ground, or tries to close it off, I vote we name the community fork "nginy".

jldugger 8y ago
Or perhaps a more us-vs-them fork, maybe something like 'ngin-us' (pronounced 'ingenious')
sumoboy 8y ago
Got to feel lucky Oracle or IBM didn't buy them, definitely would have run them into the ground.
- seunosewa 8y ago
  People thought Oracle would run MySQL into the ground, and that didn't happen.
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    That's because Oracle was too busy suing Java users and pissing on OpenSolaris. There's only so many open source projects a company can eradicate at a time.
petarb 8y ago
Can’t wait till that forks to “nginz”
vesche 8y ago
Or how about "nginext"
- cprecioso 8y ago
  thank u, nginxt

Theodores 8y ago

F5 Networks - never heard of them. After reading what they do I am not sure whether I should have heard of them.

c0l0 8y ago

I guess that signals it's time for nginx users to check out possible alternatives - just in case, if things turn out for the worse. I can recommend having a look at https://varnish-cache.org/ https://varnish-cache.org/ - while its performance might not be 100% up to par with nginx in some (very, very high-end) scenarios, it has many other fortes that nginx (at least in its FOSS release version; I've never used nginx plus) just cannot match in my experience. Having seen `varnishlog` and `varnishtest` in action alone are worth spending a day or two exploring it.

microcolonel 8y ago
Idunno, it seems fine to me. There are plenty of HTTP daemons that get the job done though, and if you have exacting requirements, there's nothing particularly difficult about writing your own specialized one (generally you don't have to write every feature of NGINX).
dharmab 8y ago
We've had good experiences with https://www.envoyproxy.io https://www.envoyproxy.io.
johnchristopher 8y ago
Then again most nginx users are going to be fine with haproxy/traefik in front of good old apache or lighttpd. Or even just apache.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  I've replaced most of my nginx instances with traefik, except those just serving static files. The configuration is more straightforward and the EncryptIt integration is a lot more elegant than in nginx's case.
- bovermyer 8y ago
  The last two companies I've worked for used træfik and haproxy, and just this last weekend I converted my home clusters from nginx to træfik. nginx is fine, but there are now other options that work just as well.

yingw787 8y ago

So...what is the future of enterprise open source? Is there a future for enterprise open source? If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. If you mix in proprietary licenses to protect yourself, AWS forks your core, adds in open-source licensed clients, then runs you into the ground (and you lose open-source contributors/supporters as a bonus who may fork your core themselves). I remember from a undergrad class reading Google's system design papers, that they publish only the top-level architecture for core systems they use, and only after 3-5 years of use when they have moved on to a better system. After all this (Docker/Redis/Elastic/Nginx), I think that might be the best path forward. You can provide the benefits of open-source and recognition for the architects, but not lose your competitive advantage. Open-sourcing your core product seems too idealistic.

MichaelMoser123 8y ago
can be, I am interviewing quite a bit lately, among start ups there seems to be a renewed interest in doing devices. Probably because it is harder to do the commoditization trick or to re-implement the solution when hardware is involved.
admax88q 8y ago
You could AGPL and sell proprietary exceptions. Amazon won't touch AGPL code.
- ignoramous 8y ago
  Well, most enterprises wouldn't: https://blog.dgraph.io/post/relicensing-dgraph/ https://blog.dgraph.io/post/relicensing-dgraph/
- sneak 8y ago
  Has the AGPL ever successfully held up in court?
  - sjwright 8y ago
    Surely it doesn't need to—either you accept the license or you don't accept the license. If you don't accept the license, you can't use the software. I'd imagine that the challenge with the AGPL is catching and suing the non-compliant services.

ChikkaChiChi 8y ago

I think this will all be alright. The open source product will continue to support most use cases the same as it always has. Customers with additional needs or edge cases will opt-in for support. The byproduct of that relationship will be to ascertain which users are growing to a point where nginx may not be able to support more mission critical needs, and that's where F5's commercial products can come in. Of course, this also means that you could expect any sort of future development that overlaps with their higher end products to vanish.

hcknews_now 8y ago

Is docker up next? Thoughts?

bouncycastle 8y ago

First time I heard of this company. Their website is in the highest order of marketing speak, but actually offering nothing much. Note to self: security services are a nice way to milk governments & corporations. In any case, I'm glad that Nginx is still available for free and the project will continue to have funding in the future from what looks like a cashed-up company. Besides, if it doesn't work out, it can always be foked. Hooray for open source software!

Zircom 8y ago
We use their VPN client at where I work...it's a mess. Disconnects all the time, IF you can even get it to connect in the first place, it like's to sit there for up to 20 minutes sometimes before it finally connects. Almost never works with captive portals, and all sorts of syncing issues with our network drives. To be fair, it might just have to do with our company's implementation, our IT department pretty hit or miss when it comes to implementing new stuff, it only rolled our 6 months ago and we do have 30,000+ employees/contractors so I'd imagine it's headache getting everything just right, but still.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
xnyan 8y ago
F5 is big in its category (software http "router") in a lot of important industries including finance and healthcare. It's the SSL terminator of choice overall for enterprise environments and is a critical part countless L3 toolchains and workflows.
black-tea 8y ago
F5 is your standard enterprise software company that big companies end up using while all employees hate using their products.

tannhaeuser 8y ago

I'm guessing this will upset many devs longing for nginx per default. Personally, I never understood why nginx is so popular with a particular demographic, and have always preferred tried-and-true Apache httpd.

zokier 8y ago
nginx had very well performing event driven core from the get-go. Apache event mpm module stabilized only in 2.4, and at that point nginx was already quite popular.

KaiserPro 8y ago

Well it makes sense for F5. Their main buisness, hardware loadbalancing is rapidly diminishing, so buying in NGINX seems like a sensible move. After all, its much easier to sell support to people who are actually _using_ your product.

laura2013 8y ago
hey, can you provide a source for their decrease in market share? Or are you assuming based on AWS growth? I tried looking up the Gartner starts but couldn't get past a login.
- KaiserPro 8y ago
  Sorry based on my own ignorance. In 2014 we had two, then I moved company to where we had 6 loadbalancers, in the four years we were there we killed them off with a mix of AWS and k8s At most recent place, I'd no even consider installing them.
jlockhardt 8y ago
F5 is loosing huge customers to a company called Avi networks. F5 employee told me F5 is scared of Avi. Might have been a move to try to compete.

sanguy 8y ago

Really sad. NGINX was the cure to F5 proprietary boxes. Up next is likely HaProxy....

jlockhardt 8y ago
We replaced F5 with Avi Networks and we are a global fortune 500.

jlockhardt 8y ago

They probably bought nginx because AVI networks has been winning F5s largest customers away one major logo at a time, and are scrambling to compete. F5 already bought a software load balancer in the past and did nothing with it, so they will once again probably do nothing with NGINX and struggle to build something as usual. I replaced f5 with AVI and know of a number of global companies that have done it as well. Interesting times for the ADC space. Bye bye nginx. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi-Networks-Doubles-Revenue-Customer-Base-Legacy https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi...

mattjaynes 8y ago

I've recently been getting quite a few marketing emails from nginx pushing for replacing F5 with nginx. Just checked and the last one I received was last thursday, March 7th. Interesting how recently nginx was continuing this campaign. I wonder how effective the "replace F5 with NGINX" marketing push was at increasing the price and urgency for the acquisition. For the curious, the big headline at the top of the message was "Modernizing Applications by Replacing F5 with NGINX Application Delivery Controller and Signal Sciences" Then the text of that top section was: "F5’s rigid and centralized approach to load balancing and web application firewall (WAF) prevents enterprises from modernizing their applications. In this recent webinar we describe how replacing or augmenting your F5 deployment with the NGINX application delivery controller and Signal Sciences WAF helps reduce costs and improve agility."

jlockhardt 8y ago
NGINX is upset that AVI networks is winning all major the F5 replacement business. I looked at NGINX in the past and the rep seemed hesitant to talk about AVI vs NGINX. Seems to be true. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi-Networks-Doubles-Revenue-Customer-Base-Legacy https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi...
- gshulegaard 8y ago
  Having worked at NGINX, I would be surprised if Avi Networks was at all a consideration for marketing F5 replacement. When I left (not too long ago), most of our enterprise sales of NGINX+ was for F5 replacement deals...which is why the marketing emphasis has always been on replacing F5. As an engineer (so I can't speak to business strategy), I always thought of Avi Networks as market validation for ancillary software services like Amplify and Controller rather than a competitor with NGINX+. But that was just my thinking.

ksajadi 8y ago

One thing I find interesting in this is the valuation: $670MM which means nginx that powers almost the entire web and has a strong monetization model is not a unicorn while some very questionable businesses are if you ask their VCs.

tyingq 8y ago

I wonder if load balancer and API gateway products might eventually converge. Things like Kong, Tyk and Apigee have caching, embedded scripting, basic load balancing, etc. They aren't as good as Nginx or Haproxy at it, but a single product outside the app would be attractive.

pull_my_finger 8y ago
Curious how you think Kong falls short of Nginx. Isn't it built on top of Nginx via Openresty/ngx_lua?
- fosk 8y ago
  Marco, CTO of Kong here. Kong is not only built on top of Nginx, but also extends it significantly to provide features that Nginx doesn’t do out of the box (dynamic configuration, SRV records resolution, dynamic Plugin based system, data plane API and so on).
- tyingq 8y ago
  Ah, yes. I was generalizing API gateway load balancing, which doesn't make sense for Kong.
jimjag 8y ago
"Things like Kong, Tyk and Apigee have caching, embedded scripting, basic load balancing, etc. " Hmmm... like Apache httpd?
- tyingq 8y ago
  Well, in addition to API gateway specifics, like API keys, counters, etc.

pretty_titan 8y ago

How can some of you do balancing, but have never heard of F5? Heck, I knew if f5 10 plus years ago. F5 can be fully automated now from top down, plus the additional security aspects are a major plus. Most people that use Nginx, and have some knowledge of load balancing products use both. It’s often called the best of bread, which Nginx and f5 are IMO. Now, a few years ago could you have automated everything? Probably not, but just look at their gitrepo. It’s pretty transparent at what their aiming at.

Ulixes 8y ago

I am using F5 BigIP 5600 for quite some time now. In one line: I hate it! Can’t rename „objects“. You can’t search properly for something in a DataGroups - at least not within the UI. There is just so much that I really hate about that product. I was about to tell my chef about NGINX - well ...

monster2control 8y ago

Terrible news

rocky1138 8y ago

Are we all going to move back to Apache httpd?

jimjag 8y ago
Why not? Apache 2.4 with the Event MPM is async and event-driven, just as fast as nginx, lower latency, more fully compliant w/ RFC specs, robust reverse proxy w/ load balancing and dynamic configuration, super-fast caching,... and fully and completely open source.
- rocky1138 8y ago
  Hey you're preaching to the converted. Tbh I have no idea why we all moved away in the first place. I was fine with Apache.

deanmoriarty 8y ago

Would be curious to know if employees are able to tap into these profits, or if somehow they are getting screwed?

dedalus 8y ago

https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/11/f5-acquires-nginx-for-670m-to-move-into-open-source-multi-cloud-services/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/11/f5-acquires-nginx-for-670m... is a much better rationale and details on how it went down

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sexyflanders 8y ago

lol

samstave 8y ago

Man I didnt even realize F5 was still relevant... I recall my first two F5 box purchases... Tore it apart with the engineer installing it for us at Decide.com in ~1999 and each box was ~$35,000 After asking about and being shown what the box was, a low end machine with a custom linux distro with a custom LB logic that was complex... I was really turned off by their implementation.... Dont get me wrong, it was revolutionary as a product and what not - but from an engineer, I was kicking myself as to how much they could charge for the thing.... Now ELBs are "free" for same functionality in cloud... So what is F5 doing - and Who is buying them, aside from governments? (I am not hating on them - trying to understand them)

platform 8y ago

I wonder if Facebook's opensourcing of BPF [1] 4 months ago had negative affects on F5's competitive advantaages. BPF allows to run user code in kernel modules, so things like packet rewriting and traffic shaping are possible. [2] [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18337429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18337429 [2]https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/bpf/docs/bpf-docs#tools-built-on-bpf https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/bpf/docs/bpf-docs#tools...

_wmd 8y ago
BPF is 12 years older than Facebook :) People don't buy individual pieces of technology, they want packaged solutions that come with support. Tech almost matters less than good support

Rapzid 8y ago

I was always under the impression nginx was keeping rather basic stuff(like downstream status) out of core so they could sell plus and that the community deserved a better defacto server.. Maybe this will be the catalyst?

purplezooey 8y ago

Wonder how the other shareholders did.

throw2016 8y ago

This is vaguely discomforting but perhaps inevitable in a world where open source is sponsored, funded or developed by corporate interests. The connection with end users and ideology has been broken as everything from the kernel to major projects are corporate funded and driven. And most inadvertently acknowledge this when they raise concerns about the sustainability of projects without financial or corporate backing. The exploding complexity of things like browsers and projects like Systemd make the idea of individuals and smalls team developing alternatives without corporate backing a non stater. Most open source projects in the last 10 years would see this kind of acquisition as an ideal outcome and for vc funded ones a necessary one. Even a 'fork' of Nginx at this time would most likely be driven by commercial motives so the 'vague discomfort' expressed in this comment itself is perhaps misplaced.

evkonst 8y ago

I wonder where that puts Wallarm that sells WAF solutions relying on NGINX and F5's Big IP is a competitor.

norin 8y ago

what happens to A10 now, being in the same market as F5?

raggi 8y ago

Congrats to them. Grateful for the product they open sourced.

Chico11Kidlet 8y ago

I still have hard time believing that commercial merger will result in Nginx remaining available as free and open source without any drawbacks and hidden payments for those requiring fully functional piece of software. Let's see what follows.

k_vinogradov 8y ago

We were one of the first three investors in Nginx in 2011 and just decided to share memories about development of the company thought the eyes of its VC shareholder: https://medium.com/runa-capital-collection/nginx-and-runa-story-6e27e2a4ab5d https://medium.com/runa-capital-collection/nginx-and-runa-st... (from idea in 2002 to exit in 2019)

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

are you fucking kidding? a sellout and a race to the bottom all in the name of dollars fucking pathetic

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