12 ms·

I still love nginx, but it's a damn shame they gate some really useful features behind their nginx plus license, namely service discovery via DNS SRV records, c

by heipei 3y ago

I still love nginx, but it's a damn shame they gate some really useful features behind their nginx plus license, namely service discovery via DNS SRV records, cache purge requests and request queueing for upstreams.

markstos 3y ago
How would you rather the devs generate revenue?
- heipei 3y ago
  I'm just daydreaming here, completely understand they have a business to run and they probably thought long and hard about which features to put into which license. No criticism intended, just something that eventually might catch up on them if another http server/proxy can offer everything that nginx does plus the missing items.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  The way that Red Hat and Nextcloud do.
  - cpuguy83 3y ago
    RedHat provided an entire platform that you pay support for... including supporting nginx. How can nginx (the company) replicate the same thing? Pay for the features you want. You will be better off for it. Expecting every company to follow the RedHat model is unsustainable.
- SteveNuts 3y ago
  They’re owned by F5, so selling support and services.
  - perbu 3y ago
    it is really, really hard to sell Nginx. their conversion rate is about 0%. they've tried really hard to so, but nobody would buy it.
    - mardifoufs 3y ago
      I thought they were making decent revenue now?
      - hawk_ 3y ago
        because they sell Plus.
        mardifoufs 3y ago
        Oh, I thought their only product was plus and I didn't realize that the comment was referring to something else! Which proves the point the comment was making very well!! So from what I understand, they also sell regular ngnix support
        re-thc 3y ago
        I know of companies that buy Plus just for the support and don't even use the Plus features.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    What support and services do you actually need though. This would create a perverse incentive to make the software more complex and unreliable and then selling the resources to fix it for you. Vs just actually selling the software and having it work flawlessly with minimal work.
    - SteveNuts 3y ago
      Have you ever worked in a large enterprise? They always want support for stuff like this. Always
heipei 3y ago
And, come to think of it, some additional great features would be automatic TLS certs via Let's Encrypt and maybe even being able to use a shared cache with multiple instances of nginx.
- dangerlibrary 3y ago
  I put off adding TLS certs to my personal website for years. It's just a few static files served by nginx on a server - there wasn't a great reason to bother, I thought. It took me almost exactly 3 minutes start to finish with letsencypt. Where 'start' was "I should stop putting that off" and typing "letsencrypt.com" into a browser, and 'finish' was nginx serving up https:// https:// on all my domains. I'm genuinely curious what nginx could possibly do to improve the situation there.
  - joseph_grobbles 3y ago
    [dead]
  - fs111 3y ago
    Check what caddy does. I think that is what op is after
  - guraf 3y ago
    It's true that setup is simple enough but what other servers like Caddy provide is automated renewals. You don't have to mess with having a .well-known always accessible on each domain, for example. Caddy does it for you and only when it's needed.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Caddy does it all automatically and you don’t have to remember to do things by hand.
  - adobrawy 3y ago
    Caddy targets single instances. No coordination is required to avoid receiving receive multiple certificates for multiple instances for same domain. Nginx has a profit from big business that would require coordination to avoid multiple certificates. For comparison, it is worth noting that to ensure such coordination, Traefik requires an Enterprise plan and a separate agent. Such a business also often has mechanisms for storing certificates, so they do not necessarily want to integrate it into Nginx.
kjs3 3y ago
Damn shame people won't pay for features they claim to need.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  The thing is, they aren't 'needs' just nice-to-haves that are provided for free with other open-source software. Thus, when trying to choose technology for personal projects, people don't choose your software. They choose a 'competitor.' Thus when it comes time to choose software with a green-field or startup, the non-free solution isn't chosen because devs aren't familiar with it. Literally, at work (a startup), we use Traefik (which is horrible imho) instead of nginx (which I've used literally everywhere else) because the devs who originally started this project had never used it on a personal project. So the issue isn't paying for it, it is about making it useful enough for personal projects that people use it for personal projects that it then gets used on professional projects. Right now, it is barely useful for personal projects unless you know what you're doing.
  - heipei 3y ago
    This is a great point. People use Caddy because for simple cases the configuration is seemingly "easy", and more importantly it includes Let's Encrypt out of the box. I've tried to argue with these users that nginx has many powerful (and necessary) features, to no avail. Traefik is a similar story: It integrates neatly with Consul for service discovery so it's a go-to tool for TLS termination in front of a service mesh. Do I personally need DNS SRV support? No, I have a templated Nomad config that will re-render and reload the nginx config if the consul upstreams change. Setting this up though is definitely a bigger hurdle than just specifying a Consul service as an upstream.
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      I mean, if nginx offered a free personal license that worked on 5 servers (which would match up to Ubuntu Pro's free personal license), I'd be all over that. I have 3 servers and I'm very unlikely to dish out $500 a month, per server, to get nginx+, but I could sell that to my employer if I was already familiar with the technology or could convince my coworkers to go give it a try and see what they thought. It seems they're more interested in high-touch sales (which is unlikely to happen on a dev team), vs. organic growth.
jbaiter 3y ago
I found that most of the time it was worth the time to invest a few hours/days into implementing the missing feature with Lua/OpenResty, if there wasn't already an Open Source extension available on GitHub.
sneak 3y ago
Just use traefik and move on with your life. Apache and Sendmail and xinetd send their regards too.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
I think they have perfectly selected features for plus. Service discovery, request queueing etc. are only required above a certain size of backend, and in this way almost 100% of the hobby sites are fine with open source version. And the hobby sites are getting reliability and security that could only comes with paid service for free.
- pilsetnieks 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - selcuka 3y ago
    I'm sure you like your site, but to be honest anything that doesn't make at least $3,675 per year is not a business, it's a hobby. Nobody said that hobbies are insignificant, they just don't (necessarily) make money.
    - pilsetnieks 3y ago
      It's one cost of so very many these days. These prices (per instance!) add up; there are many other pieces of software clamoring for their share, hardware costs, networking costs, labor costs. It's death by a thousand cuts.
    - aftbit 3y ago
      If it were $3675/business/year, I might agree. But $3675/server-instance/year is insanely expensive for many very real businesses. That's $300/month! Imagine a business like Shopify, but with one server instance per customer. No way can you afford to do that if you have to buy nginx pro for each instance. Unit economics still matter to lots of businesses. That said, you can run quite a big site without any of these features just fine. Also nginx is open source and you can implement these features yourself, either using C or Lua, relatively easily as well.
      - lolinder 3y ago
        nginx is a reverse proxy. You're not meant to be running dozens of instances, you're supposed to stick one instance in front of a whole collection of application instances. Your nginx costs don't scale with your server load, they scale with your infrastructure complexity.
artursapek 3y ago
Don’t shame an amazing open source project for trying to be financially sustainable.
- KronisLV 3y ago
  > Don’t shame an amazing open source project for trying to be financially sustainable. While one can talk about corporate contributions and basically ownership of some open source projects (the F5/Nginx case included), I also think that the funding is a big challenge for many projects out there. Now, this is from 2019, but I found the article "Software below the poverty line" to be a useful if a bit grim look at the way things are: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html
fosk 3y ago
I am biased, but Kong Gateway has built SRV resolution in the OSS product, which runs on top of Nginx: https://docs.konghq.com/gateway/latest/how-kong-works/load-balancing/#srv-records https://docs.konghq.com/gateway/latest/how-kong-works/load-b... It has been built by extending Nginx with an OpenResty-based DNS resolver instead. You could even extract it away from Kong itself and use it standalone.
morugam 3y ago
How dare they try to make money and have a successful business.
Taywee 3y ago
If people want that badly enough under a FOSS license, there's nothing really stopping them from implementing it themselves, as an add-on or a fork of the BSD-licenced codebase. If it's actually gated, not enough people care enough to get together and make and maintain a better one themselves.
- fensgrim 3y ago
  [dead]
nijave 3y ago
Check out Envoy. The config has a bit of a learning curve but it's quite powerful
dekobon 3y ago
DNS resolution may be coming: https://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-devel/2022-July/5EU3JEDJDBAOIS6D7MCLXW7KADPGWB2Z.html https://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-devel/2022-July/5E...

by heipei 3y ago

markstos 3y ago

How would you rather the devs generate revenue?

heipei 3y ago
I'm just daydreaming here, completely understand they have a business to run and they probably thought long and hard about which features to put into which license. No criticism intended, just something that eventually might catch up on them if another http server/proxy can offer everything that nginx does plus the missing items.
josephcsible 3y ago
The way that Red Hat and Nextcloud do.
- cpuguy83 3y ago
  RedHat provided an entire platform that you pay support for... including supporting nginx. How can nginx (the company) replicate the same thing? Pay for the features you want. You will be better off for it. Expecting every company to follow the RedHat model is unsustainable.
SteveNuts 3y ago
They’re owned by F5, so selling support and services.
- perbu 3y ago
  it is really, really hard to sell Nginx. their conversion rate is about 0%. they've tried really hard to so, but nobody would buy it.
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    I thought they were making decent revenue now?
    - hawk_ 3y ago
      because they sell Plus.
      - mardifoufs 3y ago
        Oh, I thought their only product was plus and I didn't realize that the comment was referring to something else! Which proves the point the comment was making very well!! So from what I understand, they also sell regular ngnix support
      - re-thc 3y ago
        I know of companies that buy Plus just for the support and don't even use the Plus features.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  What support and services do you actually need though. This would create a perverse incentive to make the software more complex and unreliable and then selling the resources to fix it for you. Vs just actually selling the software and having it work flawlessly with minimal work.
  - SteveNuts 3y ago
    Have you ever worked in a large enterprise? They always want support for stuff like this. Always

heipei 3y ago

And, come to think of it, some additional great features would be automatic TLS certs via Let's Encrypt and maybe even being able to use a shared cache with multiple instances of nginx.

dangerlibrary 3y ago
I put off adding TLS certs to my personal website for years. It's just a few static files served by nginx on a server - there wasn't a great reason to bother, I thought. It took me almost exactly 3 minutes start to finish with letsencypt. Where 'start' was "I should stop putting that off" and typing "letsencrypt.com" into a browser, and 'finish' was nginx serving up https:// https:// on all my domains. I'm genuinely curious what nginx could possibly do to improve the situation there.
- joseph_grobbles 3y ago
  [dead]
- fs111 3y ago
  Check what caddy does. I think that is what op is after
- guraf 3y ago
  It's true that setup is simple enough but what other servers like Caddy provide is automated renewals. You don't have to mess with having a .well-known always accessible on each domain, for example. Caddy does it for you and only when it's needed.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Caddy does it all automatically and you don’t have to remember to do things by hand.
- adobrawy 3y ago
  Caddy targets single instances. No coordination is required to avoid receiving receive multiple certificates for multiple instances for same domain. Nginx has a profit from big business that would require coordination to avoid multiple certificates. For comparison, it is worth noting that to ensure such coordination, Traefik requires an Enterprise plan and a separate agent. Such a business also often has mechanisms for storing certificates, so they do not necessarily want to integrate it into Nginx.

kjs3 3y ago

Damn shame people won't pay for features they claim to need.

withinboredom 3y ago
The thing is, they aren't 'needs' just nice-to-haves that are provided for free with other open-source software. Thus, when trying to choose technology for personal projects, people don't choose your software. They choose a 'competitor.' Thus when it comes time to choose software with a green-field or startup, the non-free solution isn't chosen because devs aren't familiar with it. Literally, at work (a startup), we use Traefik (which is horrible imho) instead of nginx (which I've used literally everywhere else) because the devs who originally started this project had never used it on a personal project. So the issue isn't paying for it, it is about making it useful enough for personal projects that people use it for personal projects that it then gets used on professional projects. Right now, it is barely useful for personal projects unless you know what you're doing.
- heipei 3y ago
  This is a great point. People use Caddy because for simple cases the configuration is seemingly "easy", and more importantly it includes Let's Encrypt out of the box. I've tried to argue with these users that nginx has many powerful (and necessary) features, to no avail. Traefik is a similar story: It integrates neatly with Consul for service discovery so it's a go-to tool for TLS termination in front of a service mesh. Do I personally need DNS SRV support? No, I have a templated Nomad config that will re-render and reload the nginx config if the consul upstreams change. Setting this up though is definitely a bigger hurdle than just specifying a Consul service as an upstream.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    I mean, if nginx offered a free personal license that worked on 5 servers (which would match up to Ubuntu Pro's free personal license), I'd be all over that. I have 3 servers and I'm very unlikely to dish out $500 a month, per server, to get nginx+, but I could sell that to my employer if I was already familiar with the technology or could convince my coworkers to go give it a try and see what they thought. It seems they're more interested in high-touch sales (which is unlikely to happen on a dev team), vs. organic growth.

jbaiter 3y ago

I found that most of the time it was worth the time to invest a few hours/days into implementing the missing feature with Lua/OpenResty, if there wasn't already an Open Source extension available on GitHub.

sneak 3y ago

Just use traefik and move on with your life. Apache and Sendmail and xinetd send their regards too.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

I think they have perfectly selected features for plus. Service discovery, request queueing etc. are only required above a certain size of backend, and in this way almost 100% of the hobby sites are fine with open source version. And the hobby sites are getting reliability and security that could only comes with paid service for free.

pilsetnieks 3y ago
[flagged]
- selcuka 3y ago
  I'm sure you like your site, but to be honest anything that doesn't make at least $3,675 per year is not a business, it's a hobby. Nobody said that hobbies are insignificant, they just don't (necessarily) make money.
  - pilsetnieks 3y ago
    It's one cost of so very many these days. These prices (per instance!) add up; there are many other pieces of software clamoring for their share, hardware costs, networking costs, labor costs. It's death by a thousand cuts.
  - aftbit 3y ago
    If it were $3675/business/year, I might agree. But $3675/server-instance/year is insanely expensive for many very real businesses. That's $300/month! Imagine a business like Shopify, but with one server instance per customer. No way can you afford to do that if you have to buy nginx pro for each instance. Unit economics still matter to lots of businesses. That said, you can run quite a big site without any of these features just fine. Also nginx is open source and you can implement these features yourself, either using C or Lua, relatively easily as well.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      nginx is a reverse proxy. You're not meant to be running dozens of instances, you're supposed to stick one instance in front of a whole collection of application instances. Your nginx costs don't scale with your server load, they scale with your infrastructure complexity.

artursapek 3y ago

Don’t shame an amazing open source project for trying to be financially sustainable.

KronisLV 3y ago
> Don’t shame an amazing open source project for trying to be financially sustainable. While one can talk about corporate contributions and basically ownership of some open source projects (the F5/Nginx case included), I also think that the funding is a big challenge for many projects out there. Now, this is from 2019, but I found the article "Software below the poverty line" to be a useful if a bit grim look at the way things are: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html

fosk 3y ago

I am biased, but Kong Gateway has built SRV resolution in the OSS product, which runs on top of Nginx: https://docs.konghq.com/gateway/latest/how-kong-works/load-balancing/#srv-records https://docs.konghq.com/gateway/latest/how-kong-works/load-b... It has been built by extending Nginx with an OpenResty-based DNS resolver instead. You could even extract it away from Kong itself and use it standalone.

morugam 3y ago

How dare they try to make money and have a successful business.

Taywee 3y ago

If people want that badly enough under a FOSS license, there's nothing really stopping them from implementing it themselves, as an add-on or a fork of the BSD-licenced codebase. If it's actually gated, not enough people care enough to get together and make and maintain a better one themselves.

fensgrim 3y ago
[dead]

nijave 3y ago

Check out Envoy. The config has a bit of a learning curve but it's quite powerful

dekobon 3y ago

DNS resolution may be coming: https://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-devel/2022-July/5EU3JEDJDBAOIS6D7MCLXW7KADPGWB2Z.html https://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-devel/2022-July/5E...