NGINX One Console: Not for Experts Only
The NGINX open source project has become widely used, for proxy servers, covering ingress controllers, WebAssembly and other computing technologies. Its creators, F5, attribute its adoption to its high performance, light weight, flexibility and extensibility to custom use cases through modules and scripting.
While the company has not officially said this, I would argue that the organization has decided to get more disciplined about correlating its different offerings into a platform through an API. If anything, the introduction of NGINX One, a pay-as-you-go enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, now generally available, means NGINX is now easier to adopt and use.
“We introduced NGINX One because not everyone has expert-level knowledge about NGINX, especially within our enterprise customers,” Liam Crilly, senior director, product management at F5’s NGINX, told The New Stack.
Just to be clear, this is not another single pane of glass to regroup F5’s NGINX offerings in a single template, covering the scaling needs of multiple users and locations. NGINX One offers a path to the parent company F5’s multicloud management services. Additionally, NGINX aims to extend beyond its platform to include other options, such as observability, multicloud and on-premises and security tools.
NGINX One: Key Capabilities
As NGINX’s popular data plane and other tools mature, so does the company, as it begins to pull everything together into a more comprehensive platform that also remains open and compatible to avoid that dreaded vendor lock-in.
One of the standout features of NGINX One is its intuitive, SaaS-based console. Designed with user experience in mind, the console provides a comprehensive view of all your NGINX instances, allowing you to monitor performance, manage configurations and ensure security with ease.
The key capabilities that NGINX One was designed to offer app developers, platform architects, security teams and other IT stakeholders, according to F5, include:
Real-time monitoring: Keeps an eye on traffic patterns, resource utilization and application health, with real-time data visualization. Platform teams gain visibility across the entire app ecosystem, helping to identify issues promptly.
Configuration management: Easily manages configurations across multiple environments from a unified interface. Developers can safely scale apps while adhering to enterprise standards.
Security insights: Accesses detailed security reports and alerts to anticipate potential threats. This enables security teams to enforce global policies and maintain compliance.
Performance analytics: Dive deep into performance metrics to identify bottlenecks and optimize application delivery.
Shifting Demands from Enterprises
Traditionally, NGINX has been used by application developers and DevOps teams to deliver their applications, said Shawn Wormke, vice president and general manager at NGINX, during a video presentation about NGINX One in September.
“However, more and more, we’re seeing the demands of the enterprise shift towards security, compliance and observability, driven by SecOps, platform operations and cloud architects,” Wormke said. “We spoke with groups across the enterprise and realized that NGINX isn’t just a developer tool — it’s an enterprise tool. Now, with NGINX One, we’re empowering everyone, from the application developer and platform teams to procurement.”
With NGINX One, actionable insights, configuration recommendations and “full fleet management help you optimize modern applications,” Wormke said. “This enables your enterprise to operate more effectively.
He added, “Even executives benefit from NGINX One, as they understand that, for their business to succeed, the entire team must work together. With NGINX One, the enterprise gains enhanced visibility, security, and control over their systems.”
