Recently, the NGINX Sprint China 2022 conference was held online. F5 announced the launch of three major initiatives to lead the development of China's open source industry and help Chinese users seize competitive opportunities in the wave of application modernization.

As the largest online flagship conference of F5 NGINX China in the whole year, this conference invited industry leaders and technical experts to share hot industry trends and the latest developments of NGINX, and focus on NGINX and more popular open source projects. Industry cases and best practices are discussed in depth. Rob Whiteley, Vice President of F5 and General Manager of NGINX Product Division, Zhang Shu, General Manager of Software Division of F5 NGINX China, and Guo Xue, Deputy Director of the Open Source and Software Security Department of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, attended the conference and delivered speeches.

Navigating the Trends: Three Waves

Open source software will continue to change the world, and more and more applications will be built using open source code. NGINX has played a vital role in the rise and success of open source. Rob Whiteley, vice president of F5 and general manager of the NGINX Product Division, said: Today, more than half (55%) of the world's websites run on NGINX, and almost the same proportion (53.7%) of Chinese websites run on the open source version of NGINX, precisely because NGINX has achieved these achievements only with the original intention of openness and integration.

Driven by digital technology, application modernization is becoming the trend and consensus of industrial development. NGINX believes that the development from traditional applications to modern applications will go through three waves: the first wave realizes the large-scale concurrency and expansion of applications, and the second wave that is going through now is characterized by the realization of application decoupling into micro service and connect via API.

At this stage, enterprises have higher requirements for security and K8s production environments, and NGINX is committed to providing cloud-native, K8s-friendly open source and commercial solutions, by providing scalability, visibility, security and governance functions for Power important apps and APIs.

This wave will greatly promote the development of automation technology, and applications with controllable perception and on-demand changes will emerge as the times require. In other words, in the not-too-distant future, the world will usher in the third wave marked by adaptive applications that are controllable in perception and without human intervention.

In the coming year, NGINX will work in three directions: innovate project governance and community management methods, present a modern look, continuously optimize the developer experience, and accelerate the expansion of NGINX functions to create a complete NGINX application and Supports functional stacks to manage and operate modern applications at scale. NGINX will incubate more open source projects and become more open and integrated.

Big Release: Three Initiatives to Boost the Journey

China has become an important force in the global open source system, and at the same time, China's application modernization is also developing very rapidly. Because of this, NGINX has launched three major initiatives aimed at the needs of local developers and enterprise users, which not only boost the development of China's open source industry, but also help core developers deploy modern applications more efficiently and easily.

l  Better open source services

NGINX hopes to build better enterprise-level services around open source products. Initiated by the Chinese team, NGINX Enterprise Edition, which will be applied in other regions of the world, uses the trusted open source project NGINX Open Source Edition certified by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology as the base. It is open source, stable, lightweight, flexible, and high-performance Based on the characteristics, it provides users with enterprise-level technical support services, fundamentally changing the traditional dilemma of open source product governance difficulties, no support, and nowhere to turn for help. In addition, NGINX Enterprise Edition supports a series of services such as free superimposition of professional consultants and custom development for more professional application scenarios and more complex usage requirements of enterprise users.

In addition, NGINX also launched another innovative product - NGINX Management Suite, a unified traffic management and security protection solution for NGINX instance groups. The important component NGINX Instance Manager can track and manage NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source Edition at the same time Examples help developers discover configuration problems in time and obtain repair suggestions.

As NGINX’s share in the talent market in the field of web servers continues to rise, in order to better improve the professional standards of open source software developers and provide important and scientific reference standards for the selection and employment of talents in enterprises, NGINX has specially launched official certification The grade examination, the certificate is issued by the NGINX global headquarters, divided into three levels: NAA primary, NAA intermediate and NAE advanced, to help certificate holders stand out among many applicants.

l  More input from the open source community

The development of open source is inseparable from the community. The open source community plays an important role in promoting the concept of open source and encouraging developers to communicate, participate and contribute. Therefore, NGINX firmly increases investment in the open source community, promotes open source innovation and adheres to open source best practices, and fosters and cultivates more vigorous open source forces.

In 2023, the brand-new NGINX Chinese community website will be officially launched, bringing a more modern and friendly UI, an optimized editor, and more interactive content, including daily tasks, event task rewards and other exciting functions, as well as fishing New sections such as special area, recruitment and workplace will build a more influential and active industry sharing and exchange platform for developers, and achieve mutual achievements with developers and jointly promote the development of open source.

In order to help Chinese developers improve the level of open source technology, NGINX also continues to provide developers with free learning resources. So far, it has completed the translation of more than 100 English blog articles, and has translated the popular e-book "Kubernetes: From Testing to to Production", "NGINX Real-Time API Manual" translated into Chinese. In the new year, in addition to blog articles, NGINX will also provide the Chinese community with more high-quality Chinese reference materials such as the latest version of "NGINX Complete Guide" published by O'Reilly and "Deploying NGINX as an API Gateway".

l  Broader open source ecological cooperation

NGINX will continue to cooperate with CAICT to help Chinese enterprise customers choose truly credible open source products. It will also work with app developers across industries to help them build modern apps based on the four pillars and six principles.

Due to its outstanding contribution to building a good open source ecosystem, NGINX has been awarded the "Oschina Excellent Open Source Technical Team of the Year" by Open Source China for two consecutive years. Open Source China is currently the largest open source technology community in China, bringing together open source project teams with top technical strength in the country. This award represents the industry's recognition and affirmation of NGINX.

At the same time, to build an application management and deployment ecosystem around NGINX, the latest version 1.0.0 of the NGINX Modern Application Reference Architecture (MARA) is also officially released. This architecture adopts a modular approach and provides free and open source modular components. Configure and integrate to make building modern apps simpler, more reliable, and more automated. NGINX also looks forward to cooperating with more manufacturers and developers in the industry to jointly create a modern application reference architecture suitable for different production environments.

Demonstrating Strength: Empowering Developers and Enterprises

In addition to bringing the above three major initiatives, NGINX’s full line of product portfolios also officially appeared at this conference: In the field of open source, there is not only the most classic NGINX open source version, but also the NGINX Enterprise Edition with professional service support, and the just released NGINX Modern Application Reference Architecture (MARA) version 1.0; for enterprise applications, it includes a series of products and solutions such as NGINX Plus and NGINX Management Suite.

Through these product combinations, NGINX can not only help users better use the Kubernetes network to reduce complexity, enhance security, and improve scalability, but also provide APIs with important tools for protection, management, version control, and deprecation. The Kubernetes boundary provides technologies for automatically connecting to the outside world to build high-performance, stable, secure, and scalable applications and APIs.

Zhang Shu, General Manager of Software Division of F5 NGINX China, said: Today, cloud native has ushered in the era of modern applications, and NGINX is committed to helping developers deploy modern applications more efficiently and easily, and providing a reliable foundation for building modern applications. In the future, we hope to bring better developer experience with better products and services, and actively participate in the open source community and partners' open source co-construction. At the same time, we also hope to cooperate with more local cloud vendors, exchange experience with each other, and help users easily deploy and use NGINX in various environments. We hope that with the joint efforts of all of you, more open source projects will be hatched and a new future of open source will be created together.