F5 and NGINX: Bridging the Divide

Since we announced our agreement to acquire NGINX last month, the theme that has resonated most in my discussions with customers and partners is that, together, F5 and NGINX could bridge a divide—between applications and infrastructure and between the developer and operations.

This is a divide that exists between the modern, open source applications developed in and for the cloud and the traditional, mission-critical applications that are often the last to migrate out of the enterprise data center. This is a divide that is only getting wider for NetOps teams balancing infrastructure costs and controls against DevOps teams developing applications for speed and scale. And it is a divide in which companies are using inconsistent application services from multiple vendors across various teams. What results is an application infrastructure that is unprotected, hard to manage, and unstable.

But whether traditional or modern, whether NetOps or DevOps, whether open source or enterprise, these organizations still rely on their applications to work together in concert. Put aside the differences, and both sides can agree that all applications need to be:

• Secured against advanced attacks
• Managed for scale in large, complex environments
• Reliable in production, at scale

Yet, this has been nearly impossible to do because no one has stepped up to serve customers with enterprise-grade services for all applications, traditional and modern, wherever they are built or deployed.

Until now.

F5 + NGINX is a powerful combination that can bridge this divide. We believe every organization can benefit from the agility and flexibility enabled by modern technologies, without compromising on the time-tested fundamentals of security, manageability, and reliability.

To expand upon this theme of ‘bridging the divide,’ I’ve asked the F5 Newsroom team to follow up with a few more blogs that will explore this topic further, with links added below as materials are published:

• Bridging Divides with Open Source by Lori MacVittie
• Bridging the Divide Between DevOps and NetOps by Robert Haynes
• Bridging the Divide: Traditional and Modern Architectures by Lori MacVittie
• Bridging the Divide: Scale and Reliability by Lori MacVittie
  
• Bridging the Divide: Flexibility and Security by Robert Haynes