NGINX, an Open Source Web Server for Microservice Architectures

One of the fast growing web servers, especially for high-volume sites, NGINX can be a natural fit for a microservices architecture.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, recorded at OpenStack Barcelona, NGINX CEO Gus Robertson, NGINX Head of Products Owen Garrett, and NGINX Chief Marketing Officer Peter Guagenti discussed how the latest release of the company’s commercial NGINX Plus R11, why NGINX is so good for microservices, and what NGINX was doing at an OpenStack conference in the first place.

NGINX, an Open Source Web Server for Microservices

One new feature of the R11 release is the ability to support third-party modules. “There is a community of module developers and experts who create extensions, code modules, and code add-ons for our open source product and a lot of our users depend on those extensions for value-add features. We wanted to make sure that our commercial customers can also use those third party extensions,” said Garrett.

Working in C, users can write extensions, apply to the NGINX API, publish, and distribute their extension, however best suits them, noted Garrett.

Users may worry about the quality of third party extensions when introducing open source extensions into a commercial infrastructure running NGINX+. To combat this, NGINX utilizes a ranking system along with running its own test to ensure that all submitted extensions meet its standards.

Although we have thought of NGINX as the Web server that sits in front of a Web application, the software can actually play a key role in connecting the services as well.

“Our role has increased as microservices rose,” explained Guagenti. Take Netflix, the model of a successful microservice architecture. NGINX software plays a key roll in this operation.

“Over the last 12-6 months it was mostly, ‘I’m learning about microservices,’ not any of those customers were actually going into production with a microservice architecture. That’s changed in last 6 months,” said Guagenti.

Feature image: Gus Robertson, Owen Garrett, and Peter Guagenti