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The companies that are successful in becoming digitally enabled and customer‑obsessed – and therefore prepared to compete as we enter the 2020s – are those best able to collaborate internally and externally. The dynamic combination of technology and partnering redefines and rewires organizations, necessitating a new collaborative leadership system to serve as the backbone that supports agile, collaborative execution.
In November of 2018 I started the journey to build out the NGINX strategic alliances and partnership organization. I wanted to build an infrastructure that will enable scale as we continue to grow our ecosystem. Companies come to us ready to partner – purposefully and opportunistically, in one‑to‑one relationships, multi‑partner engagements, and in ecosystems. Partner readiness for the 2020s is not as simple as having an alliance management team that supports a center of excellence offering tools and training. Partner readiness is embodied in every leadership action, operational structure, and execution motion. It extends through strategy, product, marketing, sales, support, and management. It is the strategic imperative for alliance leaders today.
With today’s announcement, we have been able to extend NGINX Plus on multiple platforms through public cloud marketplaces in a short amount of time. We also have added support for new architectures and offer our 24/7 enterprise‑grade support. We have even carved out tiered solutions:
- Dev – For your test and dev environment, with access to self‑service documentation
- Basic – For non‑critical NGINX Plus deployments where longer response times are acceptable
- Enterprise – The default standard, for any enterprise application or production environment
NGINX has also added more content about building modules and started an infrastructure for customers to gain access to our new and existing modules. We are offering the first‑ever Module Builders Fair at NGINX Conf 2019 in September, featuring training, lab hours, and access to our module experts.
We thank our partners for their continued support as we scale out our offerings together and continue to scale from increased partner demand.
NGINX Plus is critical to the scalability and performance of your software. But, let’s face it, an increasing proportion of the infrastructure needed to run applications is moving to the public cloud. From AWS to Google Cloud to Microsoft Azure, these cloud resources provide incredible flexibility and elasticity to ensure that critical resources aren’t a bottleneck to satisfying user demand.
But the cloud is constantly changing – providers are rolling out new, more efficient processors while OS environments are being fine‑tuned and updated. This presents a very present challenge to DevOps and other groups responsible for infrastructure environments, like a dynamic application gateway to manage all of your ingress and egress traffic. When do you upgrade to ensure support for the latest EC2 instance? Should you install supplemental software to get additional features required by engineering teams?
NGINX is committed to ensuring that its platform remains portable to both new hardware and operating systems, as well as supportive of improved functionality through a modular design. And, most importantly, we continue to offer innovative support programs which ensure customers always have peace of mind when deploying our technology into their software infrastructure.
New Hardware and Environment Support
NGINX, working with global technology partners like Red Hat, AWS, and Arm, is constantly evaluating compute environments to optimize platform operation. We recognize that many of our customers, especially in R&D situations, want to test the latest NGINX Plus release on popular operating systems like CentOS and Red Hat. What’s more, they want to do so on virtualized hardware that promises more efficient compute cycles and, ultimately, less cost.
Support for Amazon EC2 A1 Instances and the AWS Graviton Processor
As you are probably aware, NGINX targets scale‑out workloads such as web servers and caching fleets. Amazon EC2 A1 instances deliver significant cost savings and are ideally suited for scale‑out and Arm‑based workloads that are supported by the extensive Arm ecosystem. A1 instances are the first EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton Processors which feature 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS. We are happy to extend support of NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source to EC2 A1 instances. Users deploying workloads in this new AWS environment can expect cost reductions of up to 45%.
Support for Additional Operating Systems
NGINX Plus already supports several popular operating systems. That’s why we are excited to expand that support to include CentOS 8 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 with NGINX Plus R18, the latest release of NGINX Plus, in all marketplaces.
Availability of NGINX Plus Enterprise Support on All Marketplaces
What could be worse than relying on a piece of critical infrastructure, like an application gateway, that isn’t reliable? We are proud to say that NGINX has some of the best support in our industry. And we are constantly looking for ways to improve how we help our customers succeed. NGINX now provides customers the opportunity to purchase the Enterprise Edition of NGINX Plus which offers 24/7 support, first response within 30 minutes, hot bug fixes, and third‑party module support.
Expanding NGINX Plus Functionality in the Module Marketplace
When you implement a new, critical piece of infrastructure in your software architecture, you don’t want to replace it when you need additional functionality. And, installing more software alongside just complicates operationalization, maintenance, and on‑going support. That’s why we engineered the NGINX platform to be modular. Through our trusted partner program, our customers can expand functionality and customize their NGINX environment through dynamically loaded modules available from our module marketplace.
Alongside the new supported environments, operating systems, and support plans, our customers can find even more modules within the marketplace, and some that are certified by us to operate at scale on NGINX Plus. Historically, developers have had to create modules in the native C code of NGINX Plus. Developers can now utilize JavaScript for their module development. The NGINX JavaScript module integrates JavaScript code into the NGINX event processing model for HTTP and Stream (TCP/UDP) traffic. It extends NGINX configuration syntax with JavaScript code in order to implement sophisticated configuration solutions. NGINX is very lightweight and high performance, with language support in C and JavaScript, making it an ideal platform to develop module functionality.
In addition to providing new modules for our end customers, we are also expanding our partner program to better enable independent software vendors (ISVs) to build modules. The enhanced developer marketplace, in partnership with DigitalOcean, provides a simplified way for developers to access code and spin up NGINX instances in minutes, enabling them to quickly build solutions on top of the NGINX platform. There is also extensive documentation and examples to facilitate a quicker time‑to‑market for developers seeking to build modular functionality for the NGINX platform.
Developers and partners interested in building a module should plan to attend our annual conference, NGINX Conf 2019, during which we will host the first Module Builders Fair. This two‑day event will feature instruction, guidance, and open workshops to give participants an opportunity to work on, discuss, and ultimately present their own projects.
