Karthik Krishnaswamy

The first half of 2019 has seen significant enhancements to the NGINX Application Platform and related products: the NGINX Controller Load Balancing and API Management modules, NGINX Plus, NGINX Unit, and the NGINX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes. Catch up on what you might have missed!

NGINX Unit is a key component in our modern platform spans from code to customer: it's configured dynamically via API for no app downtime; it can run apps written in multiple languages and versions at the same time; its small footprint makes it ideal for microservices and deployable on any infrastructure.

Is your API management solution secure when vulnerabilities are found? The NGINX team builds patches into the NGINX Controller API Management Module as soon as they're available. Third-party solutions built on NGINX can leave you vulnerable while vendors test and port patches.

The NGINX Controller API Management Module secures your APIs at every API touchpoint – authenticating and authorizing third-party client applications and developers, rate limiting API calls to mitigate DDoS attacks, and protecting backend applications that process the API calls.

With NGINX Controller’s API Management Module, you define an API just once and publish it to as many environments as you want. This “create once, publish many” approach eliminates user errors as well as saving time and effort, especially if you have to define a lot of APIs.

The NGINX Controller API Management Module is next-generation solution for defining and publishing APIs, managing and securing API traffic, monitoring performance, and analyzing usage. In short, it manages the entire lifecycle of APIs without compromising performance.

NGINX Plus covers all API gateway use cases, from traditional monoliths to distributed microservices. No need for the separate microgateway that first-generation API management vendors have had to bolt onto their solutions to handle modern application architectures.

What is API management? It covers all the functions you perform on your APIs across their life cycle, including definition and publishing, securing and managing traffic, monitoring and troubleshooting to ensure customer satisfaction, and analyzing traffic to maximize business value.

The API Management Module introduced in NGINX Controller 2.0 provides control-plane functionality and a simple user interface for managing NGINX Plus as an API gateway. Infrastructure & Operations and DevOps teams can easily define, publish, monitor, and analyze APIs.

Load-balancing software appliances are derived from hardware ADCs, a legacy that limits their usefulness in modern application environments. A true software load balancer integrates into the broadest range of compute infrastructure and breadth of application types.