The document discusses the evolution of NGINX from its inception to its current state and future direction in web technology. It highlights NGINX's role as a foundational element for web applications, covering its capabilities such as load balancing, security, and support for microservices as well as recent enhancements in its product offerings. Furthermore, it addresses industry trends and how NGINX plans to adapt to ongoing changes in technology and application delivery.

1. NGINX, Inc. 2017
The Past, Present and Future
of the Modern Web
Kevin Jones
Technical Solutions Architect
@webopsx

2. • The Past
• A brief history of NGINX
• An overview of its powerful and e!cient architecture and the
problems it solved
• The Present
• The developmental pillars and what has NGINX become today… (F/
OSS and Plus)
• How can NGINX and NGINX Plus help with solve challenges we see
today?
• An Overview of NGINX Plus R11 and R12
• The Future
• Where is the industry headed?
• What will be the future and how will we adapt?
2
Agenda

3. #nginx #nginxconf3
The Past…

5. 5
“… when I started NGINX,
I focused on a very specific
problem – how to handle
more customers per
single server.”
- Igor Sysoev,NGINX creator& our founder

6. 6
Concurrency
In the beginning…
• Slow connections (ADSL or dial up)
• Long lived connections (large "le downloads)
Today…
• Mobile clients (and lots of them)
• Application architectures (live updates)
• Microservices (more API calls)

7. 7

8. MORE INFORMATION AT NGINX.COM
About NGINX Software, Inc.
• Founded in 2011
• VC-backed by enterprise software industry leaders
• Offices in SF, London, Ireland and Moscow
• Over a thousand commercial customers
• A little over 150 employees today

9. #nginx #nginxconf9
The Present.

10. #nginx #nginxconf10
Building a great application
is only half the battle,
delivering the application
is the other half.

11. #nginx #nginxconf11
Core NGINX (F/OSS)
HTTP2
JSON Logging
Stream Module (TCP… UDP)
Thread Pools
Dynamic Modules
nginScript
ECC Certi"cate Support
Linux Enhancements
The Developmental Pillars
Continued commitment to Community and Enterprise…
NGINX Plus
All of Core Plus:
DNS SRV Record Support
JWT Support (Auth)
ModSecurity 3.0 WAF
Application Health Checks
High Availability Support
Con"guration Sharing
Dynamic Recon"guration (API)
Live Activity Monitoring (API)
Cache Management (API)

12. #nginx #nginxconf12
NGINX has become
the heart of the modern web

13. #nginx #nginxconf13
• Static Content (Web Server)
• TCP/UDP Load Balancing (L4)
• HTTP Load Balancing (L7)
• Reverse Proxy (Advanced L7 Routing)
• Security Controls
• Media Delivery (VOD and Live Streaming)
• HTTP Content Caching
• Modularity (Extendable via Modules, Scripting)
Complete Application Delivery Platform

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15. MORE INFORMATION AT NGINX.COM
Solves complexity…
Web Server Load BalancerReverse Proxy Content Cache
Streaming
Media Server

16. 300 million
total sites and counting…
running on NGINX

17. 53%of the Top 10,000
most visited websites

18. 36%of all instances on
Amazon Web Services
Source: W3Techs December 2013 Web Server Survey

19. MORE INFORMATION AT
NGINX.COM
Public/Private/Hybrid
Cloud
Bare Metal Containers
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20. MORE INFORMATION AT
NGINX.COM

21. MORE INFORMATION AT
NGINX.COM

22. MORE INFORMATION AT
NGINX.COM
✓ HTTP / TCP / UDP Load Balancing
✓ Multiple algorithms:
• Round Robin, Least time, Least Connections
✓ Session Persistence
✓ Session Draining
✓ Request routing
✓ Advanced Cache Controls using an HTTP API endpoint
Advanced Load Balancing & Caching

23. MORE INFORMATION AT
NGINX.COM
✓ Regular Expression based
✓ Validate health of your backend applications
✓ Match specific HTTP responses…
• Status Codes
• Headers
• Body
✓ Layer 4 TCP/UDP send and expect based health
check available
Based on health…
✓ Stop sending traffic to unhealthy nodes
✓ Slow start – Allow for warm-up period
Advanced Health Checks & Failover

24. MORE INFORMATION AT
NGINX.COM
Security & Access Controls
✓ Secure delivery for HTTP, TCP and UDP
✓ Authentication support
✓ JWT Authentication and Authorization
✓ DDoS protection and dynamic rate controls
• Request limiting
• Connection limiting
• Bandwidth controls
✓ Limit access by creating whitelists, blacklists
based on IP, geolocation data
✓ Web Application Firewall support with
ModSecurity

25. MORE INFORMATION AT
NGINX.COM
✓ Configuration and services can be easily integrated with popular
platforms for continuous integration and delivery
✓ Dynamic reconfiguration of your backend application servers
✓ Eliminate maintenance downtime with live binary upgrades
✓ Live Activity Monitoring Dashboard and JSON API
✓ Integration with popular APM tools
Monitoring & Management Tools

26. MORE INFORMATION AT
NGINX.COM
Virtual IP
Virtual IP
Active
Backup
Failover
NGINX Deployed in a High-Availability Pair

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NGINX.COM
API Gateway
NGINX provides:
• Integration
• Security
• Request Routing
• Optimization
• Scalability

28. MORE INFORMATION AT
NGINX.COM
Microservices
Deploying NGINX along side each
microservice allows you to…
• Manage connections
• Offload authentication
• Secure services
• Cache results

29. NGINX
• Dynamic Modules
• Improved TCP/UDP load balancing
• SSL SNI - ssl_preread on; proxy_pass $ssl_preread_server_name;
• Logging functionality
• GeoIP2 module is now certi"ed
• nginScript available in NGINX Plus
29
NGINX Plus R11
(Based on F/OSS 1.11.5) October 25, 2016

30. NGINX
• Enhanced caching
• Support for stale-while-revalidate & stale-if-error cache extensions
NGINX Plus
• nginScript (general availability)
• Con"guration sharing script
• Additional statistics available via Status API (JSON)
• Server response times
• Shared memory zones
• TCP/UDP error codes
• Health check improvements (mandatory)
30
NGINX Plus R12
(Based on F/OSS 1.11.10) March 14, 2017

31. #nginx #nginxconf31
The Future.

32. #nginx #nginxconf32

33. Trends
• Development life cycles are getting shorter and applications are getting easier to
deploy
• Applications are becoming more fragile
• Monitoring and orchestration are more important than ever
How we are adapting…
• Keeping NGINX code e!cient and lightweight
• Keeping up with industry standards and technologies
• Live Activity Monitoring Enhancements
• New Products: NGINX Amplify (Open Beta!)
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Monolithic Microservices

34. Trends
• Skill set needs are changing
• Increasing number of new tools and technologies
• Organizations are performing technical and architectural reviews of existing
infrastructure
How we are adapting…
• NGINX helps solve complexity
• nginScript (JavaScript based)
• New Products: nginNext (App Server… coming soon!!)
34
Single Stack Multi-Language

35. Trends
• Roles are changing
• Developers are getting more in#uence and control of their applications
• With proper implementation of a DevOps culture, operations teams can focus more on
improving the environment and application reliability
How we are adapting…
• Focusing on API enhancements
• New product on the horizon to help the deployment of NGINX easier
35
Development &
Ops Teams
DevOps!

36. Trends
• Autoscaling has huge bene"ts, especially from a cost perspective
• Infrastructure becomes consistent and easier to manage
• Flexibility provides higher availability
How we are adapting…
• Continued partnership and integration with cloud providers and private cloud
platforms
• Working on solutions for autoscaling and cloud orchestration
36
On Premise
Multi-Platform /
Multi-Cloud

37. Trends
• Moving to containers allows you to maximize your hardware usage
• Code gets easier to deploy and manage
• The sometimes di!cult move to a microservices architecture gets a lot easier
• Environment changes are easier to control
How we are adapting…
• Dedicated Integration Engineering team
• Continued focus on containers and related platforms
37
Hardware /
Virtualization
Containers

38. Microservices
• As services get smaller and faster, the load balancer (application gateway) needs to adapt to
"t the same model (NGINX’s modular architecture makes it a perfect "t)
Troubleshooting
• Insight into applications is more important than ever because as the applications split the
logs will be more important and the services need to be monitored closely (JSON Logs,
Status API improvements, NGINXAmplify)
Flexibility
• The application load balancer needs to be robust, which means modularity and extendability.
(Dynamic Modules, nginScript)
• Feature set and functionality is important (Stream and HTTP modi"cations to support
industry changes)
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Future Challenges

39. Thank You
39
https://www.nginx.com/blog/author/kjones/
@webopsx
Kevin Jones
Technical Solutions Architect