Nginx NGINX acquired by F5

bassie · Mar 12, 2019

NGINX acquired by F5
F5 Acquires NGINX

eva2000 · Mar 12, 2019

Wow this is huge news !!! And makes more sense as to why Nginx focused so much on micro services and path towards Nginx Unit application server etc. Maybe they sold too soon, I think Nginx could of surpassed the billion dollar price tag eventually.

F5, the global leader in multi-cloud application services, announces the acquisition of NGINX, an open source leader in application delivery.

Strategic acquisition and organic investment to secure long-term revenue and EPS growth.

Together, F5 and NGINX will enable multi-cloud application services across all environments, providing the ease-of-use and flexibility developers require while also delivering the scale, security, reliability and enterprise readiness network operations teams demand.

F5 is committed to continued innovation and increasing investment in the NGINX open source project to empower NGINX’s widespread user communities.

F5 will maintain the brand with current NGINX CEO, Gus Robertson, and founders, Igor Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov, joining F5 to continue to lead NGINX.

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SEATTLE and SAN FRANCISCO, MARCH 11, 2019 – F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV) and NGINX today announced a definitive agreement under which F5 will acquire all issued and outstanding shares of privately held NGINX for a total enterprise value of approximately $670 million, subject to certain adjustments.
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eva2000 · Mar 12, 2019

from Nginx founder and creator, Igor Sysoev NGINX to Join F5

Today is an important day for NGINX. We signed an agreement to join to F5.

The NGINX team and I believe this is a significant milestone for our
open source technology, community, and the company.

F5 is committed to our open source mission. There will be no changes
to the name, projects, their licenses, development team, release
cadence, or otherwise. In fact, F5 will increase investment to
ensure NGINX open source projects become even stronger.

Our CEO, Gus Robertson, wrote a blog to explain more:
NGINX to Join F5: Proud to Finish One Chapter and Excited to Start the Next - NGINX

--
Igor Sysoev
http://nginx.com
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bassie · Mar 13, 2019

eva2000 said: ↑

F5 is committed to our open source mission.....
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eva2000 said: ↑

And makes more sense as to why Nginx focused so much on micro services and path towards Nginx Unit application server etc.
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Totally agree.
I'll believe it when I see it.

You always see this after taking over a company.
Standard company PR to keep everyone happy.

Fact of the matter is this.
F5 has paid a huge amount (see value of F5 and purchase amount)
No matter how you turn it around. This must be earned back.
After all, everyone has to eat, there is no free meal.

You are not going to give your flagship away for free.
It seems more than logical to me, that more and more (new to be developed) new features and functions are becoming premium only.

They have been using this route for some time with the Nginx Plus lineup.
And it will just get more and more.

A different discussion but more or less the same result.
I still think CentOS will disappear.

You (as IBM) are not going to pay billions of dollars,
while giving away your flagship (albeit under a different name) for free.

eva2000 · Mar 13, 2019

we shall indeed see A Letter to F5 Employees from CEO François Locoh-Donou Announcing NGINX Acquisition

eva2000 · Mar 16, 2019

F5 Networks Expands Application Delivery With NGINX Acquisition

Why F5 Needs Nginx

In some respects, F5's technologies were headed in the same direction as Nginx and Locoh-Donou commented that there is some customer overlap. The focus of the two companies, however, has been different. He said Nginx has been broadly adopted in the DevOps community and has a strong open-source following as well.

"Previously, there was a chasm between developers and operations, between applications and infrastructure. The combination of F5 and Nginx bridges that divide for the first time," Locoh-Donou said.

Locoh-Donou added that both he and Nginx CEO Gus Robertson have a shared vision: to provide a link that enables network operations and developer operations to work seamlessly together. Locoh-Donou added that the F5 ADC technology is already a robust platform, but with Nginx new opportunities will become available. More specifically, he noted that the Nginx API gateway capabilities open up a new addressable market for F5.

"Web servers and app servers are also a multibillion-dollar market, and this opens up the opportunity for us," Locoh-Donou said. "In the virtual ADC space, we have actually built organically a lot of capability. They [Nginx] have capabilities that allow us to insert capabilities much closer to the application logic, and they have a phenomenal brand in the DevOps community that we were missing."

Open Source

At the core of the Nginx product portfolio is a robust open-source project and community. F5 has pledged that it will continue to support Nginx's open-source efforts after the acquisition closes.

"They [Nginx] have a bunch of users that have a passion for, and a preference for, open-source, and there are some subset of those users mostly moving into enterprise-type solutions that are looking for enterprise-level capability," Kara Sprague, senior vice president and general manager of Application Services at F5 Networks, said.

Sprague said that Nginx's commercial users choose to move up from the open-source product to the paid offerings to get additional enterprise capabilities, including improved visibility and analytics.

"We remain committed to and are very excited about the open-source legacy of Nginx," Sprague said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
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robert syputa · Mar 17, 2019

F5 has good reasons to keep the core NGINX as free open source. The field is becoming more crowded as cloud networking and mobile applications environments overlap and merge.

deltahf · Mar 20, 2019

I'm not really sure how to feel about this, possibly because I don't understand exactly what F5 "does". I have heard the name before, but it's not clear to me exactly what they offer, and their website appears to just offer a lot of buzzwords and platitudes.

Is it just an IT/web infrastructure services company, that other companies can hire to manage their operations? I don't understand why a company like that would want to spend so much money on Nginx.

wmtech · Mar 20, 2019

deltahf said: ↑

possibly because I don't understand exactly what F5 "does".
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F5 Networks - Wikipedia

eva2000 · Mar 21, 2019

wmtech said: ↑

F5 Networks - Wikipedia
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yeah I originally new F5 for it's hardware load balancers, but looks like they have branched out now

F5 Networks, Inc. is a global company that specializes in application services and application delivery networking (ADN). F5 technologies focus on the delivery, security, performance, and availability of web applications, as well as the availability of servers, cloud resources, data storage devices, and other networking components. F5 is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, with additional development, manufacturing, and sales/marketing offices worldwide.

Known originally for its load balancing product, today F5's product and services line has expanded into all things related to the delivery of applications, including local load balancing and acceleration, global (DNS based) load balancing and acceleration, security through web application firewall and application authentication and access products, DDoS defense. F5 technologies are available in the data center and the cloud, including private, public, and multi-cloud environments based on platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and OpenStack.
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eva2000 · Mar 26, 2019

https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-f5-continued-commitment-open-source/

NGINX and F5 Are Committed to NGINX Open Source
Let me take a moment to be very explicit: F5 is committed not only to supporting the development of NGINX Open Source and other NGINX open source projects, but to increasing investment over time.

Just to repeat that. F5 is committed to the NGINX open source technology, developers, and community.

I mentioned this in my blog post about the acquisition. F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou mentioned it in his open letter to F5 employees. And numerous articles have covered the F5 promise to be a good steward of NGINX Open Source, including Computer Business Review, Business Insider, CRN, ZDNet, and The New Stack.

We’re also seeing increased acceptance of mainstream companies as stewards of open source technologies. Recently Microsoft bought GitHub. VMware bought Heptio. And IBM bought Red Hat. The assumption that Big-Fish-Eats-Little-Fish means Big-Fish-Kills-Open-Source-Project is outdated thinking. The companies acquiring open source technologies are spending large amounts of cash to create value, not destroy it.

If software is eating the world, then open source is eating software. Open source is a huge driver of software innovation and powers the most compelling applications and digital services on the planet. It’s a key resource and a large part of what attracted F5 to NGINX. Trust me when I say that neither NGINX nor F5 wants to destroy the value the NGINX team spent 15 years creating.

On second thought, I’ve changed my mind. . .don’t trust me. Watch us instead! When we announced NGINX Plus in 2013, members of the open source community expressed the same concerns as they are now. Since then we have delivered new features and capabilities in NGINX Open Source every month. We added TCP, UDP, gRPC, and HTTP/2 capabilities, to name just a few.
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And we’re not stopping there. Our plan for 2019 is to accelerate open source development with even more capabilities. Notable roadmap items include:

NGINX – QUIC and HTTP/3 implementations, as well as support for asynchronous file open

NGINX Unit – Java servlet containers, proxying capabilities, static file support

njs – Support for JavaScript modules (import/export) and deeper NGINX integrations

All said and done, we expect to make 30+ releases of open source software during 2019, with updates to the NGINX Open Source mainline continuing at the established cadence of a release every six weeks.

In addition to features and project development, we’re also keeping NGINX Conf, our annual user event. We expect more than half of this year’s speakers to come from the community and discuss open source use cases. Keep an eye out for the call for papers and save the date: September 10–11 in Seattle.

Can’t wait until September? Join one of our monthly meetups! In February we hosted Gremlin to talk chaos engineering, and our own Faisal Memon updated attendees on NGINX Open Source. Next up, we’re doing a deep dive on NGINX Unit.

We’re Committed to Maintaining, and Even Increasing, Resources
We anticipate that the additional resources F5 brings to bear will enable us to develop more open source features, host more open source events, and produce more open source content than we can now. In fact, already F5 has committed to:

Migrate the NGINX development team. NGINX co‑founders Igor Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov are joining F5, along with the core open source development team.

Continue supporting users. We’ll continue staffing the open source mailing list and providing detailed release notes.

Maintain nginx.org. We will keep the name of the project, along with the nginx.org website and all the valuable documentation on docs.nginx.com.

Keep the NGINX repositories. We’ll continue to check our great software into Mercurial and mirror it to GitHub NGINX Unit and the Kubernetes Ingress Controller.

What excites me the most, though, is the potential to increase investment in our open source capabilities. By that I mean that after the deal closes, F5 will help us:

Hire more developers to write great code

Build a team of community managers to strengthen our presence

Develop more evangelists to share the value of NGINX around the world

Create even more content on NGINX software, tips, tricks, and best practices

Do more of the things that made NGINX so great, and do them faster

Stay Tuned for More Exciting Open Source Evolution
I believe words are cheap and actions matter more. I think you’ll find both NGINX and F5 are committed to making sure that NGINX Open Source not only survives, but thrives.

As we find new and powerful ways to combine F5 and NGINX technology, people, and resources, we’re confident that you’ll see an accelerated pace in NGINX open source projects.

Watch this space. We’ve got great things planned and look forward to even more community engagement than before.
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rdan · Mar 31, 2019

It would be Great News if Cloudflare Purchased/Acquired Nginx.

eva2000 · Apr 24, 2019

rdan said: ↑

It would be Great News if Cloudflare Purchased/Acquired Nginx.
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indeed it would - we can all wished hehe

https://techfieldday.com/video/nginx-company-introduction-and-product-strategy/

This video is part of the appearance, “NGINX Presents at Cloud Field Day 5“. It was recorded as part of Cloud Field Day 5 at 16:00-18:00 on April 10, 2019.

An overview of the NGINX strategy and product portfolio. This session covers key use cases, how the platform is evolving, and the vision of combining NGINX with F5.
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eva2000 · May 12, 2019

More coverage on F5's acquisition of Nginx F5 acquires NGINX: What to expect from the deal | ZDNet

Let's make one thing clear immediately: While a speedy web server is all well and good, this deal is not about web servers per se -- nor is it about what had long been seen as a rivalry between Nginx and the Apache HTTP Server.

No, François Locoh-Donou F5's CEO explained ahead of the deal's completion that the two companies will be about providing DevOps for cloud networking. Specifically, the pair will bring together "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."

NGINX CEO Gus Robertson assures NGINX customers that "F5 is committed to the NGINX open-source technology, developers, and community." NGINX's open-source heart will keep beating on in F5's body.

As for NGINX's commercial products, moving forward Robertson says they will be:

Infusing F5 security capabilities into NGINX products.

Extending NGINX Controller with additional control plane functionality to manage lightweight application delivery controller (ADCs) and load-balancers.

Enhancing the NGINX Controller API Management Module.

Accelerating the development of a new NGINX Controller Service Mesh Module for microservices and Kubernetes capabilities.

When you put it all together, you see the two joining forces to create an open-source-based, high-end network application services for today's cloud-based IT world.

NGINX's customers and partners like this idea. At Red Hat Summit in Boston, NGINX VP of Global Strategic Alliances and Partnerships Christine Puccio said: "We already have really good movement on controllers. A lot of our security and management partners want to plug into out open APIs. With our partners, we've developed kind of a target list of features they need, and we already have designs in the pipeline."

To make all this work and help integrate F5 and NGINX's products together, Robertson, along with the company's founders and its 250-employee team, will continue to run the NGINX business from its San Francisco home.
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