2 years ago

Category: Software, Business, Kubernetes, nginx

At this year’s NGINX Sprint 2.0 virtual conference, NGINX, the arm of F5 behind the popular open source web server/load balancer and reverse proxy of the same name, made several declarations as to its intentions concerning open source software, undefined upcoming open source releases and its participation in the Kubernetes Ingress project. In a blog post and during his keynote at Sprint 2.0, Rob Whiteley, general manager of the NGINX Product Group at F5, discussed how the company wants to clearly define its approach to open source software moving forward, as well as commit further to open source participation in the months ahead. When F5 acquired NGINX, I think the fear was that we were going to abandon our open source roots, and that anything we did in open source would just be for a revenue benefit.

Following that, NGINX saw interest from customers in a form of NGINX that didn’t require Lua, and so they built yet another open source NGINX ingress controller.

He further explained that NGINX had worked to extend its open source ingress controller using custom resource definitions (CRDs) instead of the annotations used by the default ingress-nginx, and that the Gateway API team was interested in using this approach.