from Hacker News

Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

by eduren on 3/11/19, 8:11 PM with 383 comments

  • by yingw787 on 3/11/19, 9:09 PM

    So...what is the future of enterprise open source? Is there a future for enterprise open source?

    If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. If you mix in proprietary licenses to protect yourself, AWS forks your core, adds in open-source licensed clients, then runs you into the ground (and you lose open-source contributors/supporters as a bonus who may fork your core themselves).

    I remember from a undergrad class reading Google's system design papers, that they publish only the top-level architecture for core systems they use, and only after 3-5 years of use when they have moved on to a better system. After all this (Docker/Redis/Elastic/Nginx), I think that might be the best path forward. You can provide the benefits of open-source and recognition for the architects, but not lose your competitive advantage. Open-sourcing your core product seems too idealistic.

  • by c0l0 on 3/11/19, 9:08 PM

    I guess that signals it's time for nginx users to check out possible alternatives - just in case, if things turn out for the worse.

    I can recommend having a look at https://varnish-cache.org/ - while its performance might not be 100% up to par with nginx in some (very, very high-end) scenarios, it has many other fortes that nginx (at least in its FOSS release version; I've never used nginx plus) just cannot match in my experience. Having seen `varnishlog` and `varnishtest` in action alone are worth spending a day or two exploring it.

  • by raiyu on 3/11/19, 8:25 PM

    With everything that is going on with open source licensing this certainly can create a bit of worry down the line.

    Interesting to also see what aws is doing in response to some of the more complicated licensing agreements and specifically elastic search: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-...

    The challenge for nginx was they raised VC capital so they were in a forcing function. Either grow revenue or get acquired. Could have remained an independent oss product for ever but alas no more.

  • by miguelmota on 3/11/19, 8:36 PM

  • by clinta on 3/11/19, 8:29 PM

    I'm nervous about what this means for the future of nginx's built in load balancing. That's been an important and rock-solid part of my infrastructure.

  • by hannasanarion on 3/11/19, 9:01 PM

    In the event that F5 pulls an Oracle and horribly mismanages nginx, runs it into the ground, or tries to close it off, I vote we name the community fork "nginy".

  • by ClassAndBurn on 3/11/19, 8:27 PM

    Nginx is an incredible product. I've used it at nearly every company I've been at and on multiple occasions its entirely saved us both via its capabilities and its accessible, robust documentation that we had to read at 2 AM while fire fighting. Congrats to the team on a hard fought journey.

  • by chx on 3/11/19, 8:43 PM

    "F5 is committed to continued innovation and increasing investment in the NGINX open source project to empower NGINX’s widespread user communities." from https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-n... what do we know of F5 history in open source?

  • by mattjaynes on 3/11/19, 11:01 PM

    I've recently been getting quite a few marketing emails from nginx pushing for replacing F5 with nginx. Just checked and the last one I received was last thursday, March 7th.

    Interesting how recently nginx was continuing this campaign. I wonder how effective the "replace F5 with NGINX" marketing push was at increasing the price and urgency for the acquisition.

    For the curious, the big headline at the top of the message was "Modernizing Applications by Replacing F5 with NGINX Application Delivery Controller and Signal Sciences"

    Then the text of that top section was:

    "F5’s rigid and centralized approach to load balancing and web application firewall (WAF) prevents enterprises from modernizing their applications. In this recent webinar we describe how replacing or augmenting your F5 deployment with the NGINX application delivery controller and Signal Sciences WAF helps reduce costs and improve agility."

  • by eduren on 3/11/19, 8:13 PM

  • by ChikkaChiChi on 3/11/19, 9:14 PM

    I think this will all be alright. The open source product will continue to support most use cases the same as it always has. Customers with additional needs or edge cases will opt-in for support. The byproduct of that relationship will be to ascertain which users are growing to a point where nginx may not be able to support more mission critical needs, and that's where F5's commercial products can come in.

    Of course, this also means that you could expect any sort of future development that overlaps with their higher end products to vanish.

  • by benfortuna on 3/11/19, 9:31 PM

    In what world is NGINX worth so much less than WhatsApp, Snapchat, and some other sites of dubious value?

    The world of economists has no idea how to value technology beyond narrow ad-based business models.

  • by ksajadi on 3/11/19, 11:05 PM

    One thing I find interesting in this is the valuation: $670MM which means nginx that powers almost the entire web and has a strong monetization model is not a unicorn while some very questionable businesses are if you ask their VCs.

  • by tootie on 3/11/19, 8:26 PM

    Interesting move. Big IP is a hell of a product on it's own. Curious to see how they add nginx to their product line and what this means for open source usage.

  • by dedalus on 3/12/19, 2:22 AM

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/11/f5-acquires-nginx-for-670m... is a much better rationale and details on how it went down

  • by platform on 3/12/19, 3:10 AM

    I wonder if Facebook's opensourcing of BPF [1] 4 months ago had negative affects on F5's competitive advantaages.

    BPF allows to run user code in kernel modules, so things like packet rewriting and traffic shaping are possible. [2]

    [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18337429

    [2]https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/bpf/docs/bpf-docs#tools...

  • by sanguy on 3/11/19, 10:21 PM

    Really sad. NGINX was the cure to F5 proprietary boxes.

    Up next is likely HaProxy....

  • by throw2016 on 3/12/19, 5:00 AM

    This is vaguely discomforting but perhaps inevitable in a world where open source is sponsored, funded or developed by corporate interests.

    The connection with end users and ideology has been broken as everything from the kernel to major projects are corporate funded and driven.

    And most inadvertently acknowledge this when they raise concerns about the sustainability of projects without financial or corporate backing. The exploding complexity of things like browsers and projects like Systemd make the idea of individuals and smalls team developing alternatives without corporate backing a non stater.

    Most open source projects in the last 10 years would see this kind of acquisition as an ideal outcome and for vc funded ones a necessary one. Even a 'fork' of Nginx at this time would most likely be driven by commercial motives so the 'vague discomfort' expressed in this comment itself is perhaps misplaced.

  • by samstave on 3/12/19, 2:59 AM

    Man I didnt even realize F5 was still relevant...

    I recall my first two F5 box purchases...

    Tore it apart with the engineer installing it for us at Decide.com in ~1999 and each box was ~$35,000

    After asking about and being shown what the box was, a low end machine with a custom linux distro with a custom LB logic that was complex... I was really turned off by their implementation....

    Dont get me wrong, it was revolutionary as a product and what not - but from an engineer, I was kicking myself as to how much they could charge for the thing....

    Now ELBs are "free" for same functionality in cloud...

    So what is F5 doing - and Who is buying them, aside from governments? (I am not hating on them - trying to understand them)

  • by pretty_titan on 3/12/19, 12:06 AM

    How can some of you do balancing, but have never heard of F5? Heck, I knew if f5 10 plus years ago. F5 can be fully automated now from top down, plus the additional security aspects are a major plus. Most people that use Nginx, and have some knowledge of load balancing products use both. It’s often called the best of bread, which Nginx and f5 are IMO. Now, a few years ago could you have automated everything? Probably not, but just look at their gitrepo. It’s pretty transparent at what their aiming at.

  • by bouncycastle on 3/11/19, 9:32 PM

    First time I heard of this company. Their website is in the highest order of marketing speak, but actually offering nothing much. Note to self: security services are a nice way to milk governments & corporations.

    In any case, I'm glad that Nginx is still available for free and the project will continue to have funding in the future from what looks like a cashed-up company. Besides, if it doesn't work out, it can always be foked. Hooray for open source software!

  • by buryat on 3/11/19, 8:53 PM

    what are some good alternatives to nginx?

  • by k_vinogradov on 3/12/19, 9:15 PM

    We were one of the first three investors in Nginx in 2011 and just decided to share memories about development of the company thought the eyes of its VC shareholder:

    https://medium.com/runa-capital-collection/nginx-and-runa-st... (from idea in 2002 to exit in 2019)

  • by gigatexal on 3/11/19, 8:47 PM

    Wow. Huge exit for them. Didn’t see this coming.

  • by snissn on 3/11/19, 8:24 PM

    congrats Nginx team! i've gotten lots of value out of your product

  • by deanmoriarty on 3/12/19, 1:16 AM

    Would be curious to know if employees are able to tap into these profits, or if somehow they are getting screwed?

  • by Ulixes on 3/12/19, 12:44 AM

    I am using F5 BigIP 5600 for quite some time now. In one line: I hate it! Can’t rename „objects“. You can’t search properly for something in a DataGroups - at least not within the UI. There is just so much that I really hate about that product. I was about to tell my chef about NGINX - well ...

  • by tyingq on 3/11/19, 11:10 PM

    I wonder if load balancer and API gateway products might eventually converge. Things like Kong, Tyk and Apigee have caching, embedded scripting, basic load balancing, etc. They aren't as good as Nginx or Haproxy at it, but a single product outside the app would be attractive.

  • by Rapzid on 3/12/19, 3:27 AM

    I was always under the impression nginx was keeping rather basic stuff(like downstream status) out of core so they could sell plus and that the community deserved a better defacto server.. Maybe this will be the catalyst?

  • by KaiserPro on 3/11/19, 9:35 PM

    Well it makes sense for F5.

    Their main buisness, hardware loadbalancing is rapidly diminishing, so buying in NGINX seems like a sensible move.

    After all, its much easier to sell support to people who are actually _using_ your product.

  • by raggi on 3/12/19, 7:53 AM

    Congrats to them. Grateful for the product they open sourced.

  • by evkonst on 3/12/19, 6:56 AM

    I wonder where that puts Wallarm that sells WAF solutions relying on NGINX and F5's Big IP is a competitor.

  • by tannhaeuser on 3/11/19, 9:33 PM

    I'm guessing this will upset many devs longing for nginx per default. Personally, I never understood why nginx is so popular with a particular demographic, and have always preferred tried-and-true Apache httpd.

  • by rocky1138 on 3/12/19, 1:07 AM

    Are we all going to move back to Apache httpd?

  • by astrodust on 3/11/19, 8:40 PM

    Yeah, well, that was fun while it lasted.

  • by purplezooey on 3/12/19, 4:59 AM

    Wonder how the other shareholders did.

  • by monster2control on 3/12/19, 12:44 AM

    Terrible news

  • by norin on 3/12/19, 7:20 AM

    what happens to A10 now, being in the same market as F5?

  • by sexyflanders on 3/12/19, 2:47 AM

    lol

  • by Chico11Kidlet on 3/12/19, 12:03 PM

    I still have hard time believing that commercial merger will result in Nginx remaining available as free and open source without any drawbacks and hidden payments for those requiring fully functional piece of software.

    Let's see what follows.

  • by patrickg_zill on 3/11/19, 8:53 PM

    Congratulations to nginx. It could be an acqui-hire or it could be a defensive move by F5.

  • by hcknews_now on 3/11/19, 9:23 PM

    Is docker up next? Thoughts?

  • by jandeboevrie on 3/11/19, 8:24 PM

    Seems to be too early for an April fool's joke :(

  • by Theodores on 3/11/19, 9:03 PM

    F5 Networks - never heard of them.

    After reading what they do I am not sure whether I should have heard of them.

  • by jlockhardt on 3/11/19, 10:58 PM

    They probably bought nginx because AVI networks has been winning F5s largest customers away one major logo at a time, and are scrambling to compete. F5 already bought a software load balancer in the past and did nothing with it, so they will once again probably do nothing with NGINX and struggle to build something as usual. I replaced f5 with AVI and know of a number of global companies that have done it as well. Interesting times for the ADC space. Bye bye nginx. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi...