F5 launches NGINX One

F5 has introduced F5 NGINX One, combining advanced load balancing, web and application server capabilities, API gateway functionalities, and security features in a dedicated package. Customers are now able to simply manage and secure F5 NGINX instances and NGINX Open Source from a single cloud management interface. End-to-end visibility speeds apps to market and enables advanced features like AI more efficiently versus a traditional siloed approach.

This new offering makes NGINX technology easier to deploy, unlocking capabilities unmatched by competitors. NGINX One consolidates formerly individual offerings such as NGINX Plus into a unified solution, leading to cost savings and simplified deployments. Via the new NGINX One Console, customers can ensure global policy compliance and establish a comprehensive view of NGINX, making it easier for organisations to do the right thing for their teams and their business.

“Successful application deployment is a team sport,” said Shawn Wormke, Vice President and General Manager for NGINX at F5. “App delivery and security functions—and corresponding visibility—are often sequestered among individual groups. NGINX One is ideal for modern, ephemeral, and cloud-native app components such as containers and Kubernetes, providing a solution that cost-effectively optimises, scales, and secures complicated application and API environments across multiple teams.”

Today’s application teams in the enterprise face the unprecedented difficulty of delivering apps across a wide variety of contexts—from high-performance “bare metal” servers to virtual machines and sprawling Kubernetes clusters, across data centers and in the public cloud. Applying uniform policies for security, compliance, and app delivery configuration has challenged these new widely distributed application architectures. For many organisations, maintaining hybrid and multicloud environments adds considerable operational overhead.

NGINX One improves app security and delivery for development, operations, and platform teams by making it easier to own, optimise, and govern NGINX components in any context. With the NGINX One Console, teams can broadly and easily enforce security policies across the application ecosystem, receive and implement configuration guidance, and automate version and patch updates—all helping to ensure compliance.

“The success of microservices-based and containerised applications and app components relies on the work of many separate teams,” said Jim Mercer, IDC Program Vice President, Software Development, DevOps, and DevSecOps. “NGINX One is essentially designed to make it easier to harmonise these workflows. This release marks the evolution of NGINX from primarily a development tool to a more mature enterprise-class SaaS-based solution. As a result, customers may be able to reduce certain point solutions since they can see performance and security data across the NGINX application landscape without being limited to a single Kubernetes cluster.”

Unified visibility across today’s hybrid multicloud environments

Many organisations run both NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source but have historically not had cross-team views when making changes or adding NGINX instances. NGINX One extends visibility and observability across multiple functions, enabling unified policy enforcement and ensuring that dev teams can scale apps in line with business demands. NGINX One also provides updated visualisation tools to clearly monitor and present data to each team in the application delivery workflow, further enhancing compelling use cases such as zero trust initiatives and AI inference solutions.

Centralised configuration and management of traffic optimisation, security, and scale

As delivering applications becomes more complex, NGINX One provides simplified and centralised management that enables enterprises to innovate more quickly without compromising security or observability. Running alongside F5 Distributed Cloud Services’ growing feature set, the NGINX One Console provides SaaS-based visibility and management so customers can add security and optimisation functionality with just a few clicks in an updated GUI. Previously, platform and network operations were often required to perform a series of manual tasks to configure and update instances running in different infrastructure environments.

Simplified integration for enhanced app and API performance within the F5 ecosystem

Customers can now benefit from performance advantages across the F5 solution portfolio, putting observability, licensing, and configuration all in one place. This approach enables new app and API security and optimisation capabilities to be deployed across both NGINX and Distributed Cloud Services. In addition, NGINX One provides new sets of telemetry and AI capabilities for additional insight into app performance, security, and scaling needs—including surfacing areas for improvement and providing specific recommendations.

“NGINX software and open source solutions are some of the most widely used technologies on the Internet, underpinning thousands of application delivery environments,” said Juan Zamora, CEO and founder of Hopla! Software. “With NGINX One, we can provide enterprise-grade services and consistent application traffic management for any deployment model.”

“We rely on NGINX for our Tier 1 applications. NGINX One is giving Medallia lots of visibility into our NGINX Plus instances, and it has helped us identify some system vulnerabilities,” said Vinnie Chhabra, IT Engineer at Medallia. “Looking forward, NGINX One will be essential for our IT and InfoSec teams to expand our visibility into usage, performance, and security.”