NGINX is transforming its offerings into a one-stop application development and delivery platform, so teams can build or modernize applications with a collection of DevOps tools and best practices. Today, NGINX launched its new NGINX Application Platform, a suite of products which together, form a solution made up of application delivery, an application server, and policy-driven monitoring and management.

“We work with organizations who are often looking to move from a physical to a cloud data center or they are looking to move from a monolithic to a microservices approach for their applications, and they use NGINX to ensure that the lights never go out,” said Owen Garrett, head of products at NGINX. “We looked at the challenges they’re facing and there is much more we can do to help enterprises who are looking to run across different types of environments and use different application architectures.”

The platform includes NGINX Plus, a combined load balancer, content cache and web server. NGINX Plus extends open source NGINX, and the software-based application delivery controller for the web is now on its 13th release, according to a company announcement today. The platform also includes NGINX Controller, a centralized management and monitoring platform for NGINX Plus. An enterprise will be able to use NGINX Controller to define how they want their application to be delivered, what load balancing policies they want, what SLAs they want their application to meet, and it will be responsible for pushing those policies up to NGINX so they take effect, said Garrett.

Another part of the company’s announcement is NGINX Unit, a server for modern applications. It’s a “new building block” for applications, it’s lightweight, it supports a wide range of application languages like PHP, Python, and Go, and it will implement internal networking, according to Garrett.

It’s also suited for large microservice applications, and it will handle the communication between individual instances of the application in what’s known as a service mesh, which is highly dependent on the strength of its proxy, according to Gus Robertson, CEO of NGINX, in a statement.

NGINX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes

In addition to the new application server and central management tools, NGINX added the ability to use NGINX Plus as a Kubernetes Ingress Controller. As interest in containers and specifically, Kubernetes, grows in the enterprise, teams need to find a platform to embrace these new technologies and help speed up cloud native application development, according to the company announcement.

“In today’s digital environment, it’s critical to deliver feature-rich applications that can quickly respond to changing business requirements,” said Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift, at Red Hat. “Containers and Kubernetes increasingly serve as the basis of modern and agile apps and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform provides an innovative platform to help embrace these technologies and drive digital transformation.”

NGINX is based on the open source NGINX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes, and it gives organizations the ability to deploy applications within Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform anywhere across a cluster. Also, with NGINX Plus, OpenShift customers can have access to a commercial Ingress controller for traffic management and load balancing of services running in OpenShift, added Badani.