
Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks - eduren
https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-joins-f5/
======
yingw787
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.

~~~
admax88q
You could AGPL and sell proprietary exceptions. Amazon won't touch AGPL code.

~~~
yingw787
Maybe. At least our company won't touch GPL code; as one colleague described
to me, if you violate a proprietary license, a company will come after you for
money, while violating a GPL license gets the EFF involved who will come after
you for your source code.

I'm still wary, though. I could imagine if the resultant fines or source code
releases from violating a GPL license weren't a strong enough deterrent, you
could win by using a GPL-licensed product enough, then parry off attacks from
EFF/FSF until you do a complete rewrite of the product underneath, then pay
the fine/contribution to EFF/FSF while toppling the original company. If the
company is big enough, and can afford enough good lawyers, there may be legal
ways to get around laws.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7572332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7572332)

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
The only claimants to your source code are those to whom you've distributed
binaries built from GPL sources. Anyone else can pound sand.

~~~
hisham_hm
not the case for AGPL: then it's everyone who has access to your online
service built with the code.

~~~
j16sdiz
I don't think it works like that.

This is a copyright license at its heart. It is a contract between the
copyright-owner and the service owner. The end user is just 3rd party.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Wait, isn't the whole point of AGPL that the "user" entitled to the source
code is now the _service user_ , i.e. potentially everyone?

------
c0l0
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/](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.

~~~
darksoul
According to the public statements, F5 is committing to maintain the current
level of resources NGINX has allocated to their open source programs, to keep
the same dev team involved, to keep licensing as it currently is, not change
any of the repositories on Mercurial and GitHub and to keep the NGINX brand.

Which only means that NGINX will get even better over time.

~~~
dsl
NGINX was already paywalling bug fixes once they launched Pro.

proxy_pass for example will only resolve a hostname at the time the
configuration is parsed, unless you use a convoluted variable hack. This was a
serious issue requiring you to restart your fleet if a backend server changed
IPs. The bug fix for this was implemented only in Pro and sold as "DNS for
Service Discovery."

~~~
keypusher
Put a load balancer between your reverse proxy and your backends. Problem
solved.

~~~
corebit
What do you think nginx was being used for?

------
miguelmota
Acquired for $670 million

[https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-
releases/f5-acquires-n...](https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-
releases/f5-acquires-nginx-to-bridge-netops-devops)

~~~
shereadsthenews
Cash, apparently. I like how Wilson Sonsini advised F5 in the purchase while
firm heir Peter Sonsini invested in Nginx corp. Good times for old money in
the Valley.

~~~
StudentStuff
I thought F5 was primarily a Seattle based company? I've known more F5
employees growing up in Seattle than Amazon employees at least.

On another note, F5's poorly written code is the reason TLS 1.0 is considered
insecure (using a variant of the POODLE attack), among other major security
lapses.

~~~
mlindner
F5 has a few hundred person office in San Jose as well as a decent amount in
Tel Aviv as well.

~~~
shereadsthenews
Sure but it's not engineers who are getting paid in this deal, it's VCs and
lawyers.

------
raiyu
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-...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-open-
open-distro-for-elasticsearch/)

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.

~~~
imglorp
Could this simply be about losing hardware sales to this newfangled open
source? A big F5 rig used to go for $175k, vs $30k-sh for an nginx on plain
hardware.

[https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-plus-vs-f5-big-ip-a-
price-p...](https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-plus-vs-f5-big-ip-a-price-
performance-comparison/)

~~~
X-Istence
A big F5 rig is basically Linux with a CLI/admin interface on top.

~~~
gbuk2013
(I work for F5.) This is not true - Linux is really just userspace to run our
own data-plane code.

~~~
pbarnes_1
Serious question: what does it actually do in non-corp speak, though?

~~~
joshAg
It's an inline swiss-army-network appliance that can do a fuckton of things at
the speed of packets or nearly so up to 100Gbs.

load balancing? check.

stateful load balancing? check.

ssl-termination? check.

HSM-enabled ssl-termination? check.

hardware accelerated ssl-termination? check.

firewall? check.

NG firewall? check.

compiled Lua/tcl (i forget which) scripts so you can program something
insanely complicated? check.

SAML? check.

ISP sized NATs? check.

etc.

Plus, way more configuration knobs and options than you'd ever want at each
network layer. Like, come up with a load balancing scheme where Tls1.2 clients
using Poly1305-chacha20 get sent to a specific pool of servers while
everything else goes to another pool, except for clients trying to use QUIC
and who are coming from a specific range of IP. They go to another set of
servers.

Maybe a better way to think of it is that it's a single device for tweaking
anything L3-L7 for your server and parts of your network.

(used to work for f5, too, but i'm not sure how specific i can get with the
nda).

~~~
ignoramous
Thanks.

As the industry [0] continues to put its weight behind NFV [1] and SDNs [2]
along with the rise of IDNs [3], do you see network-appliances keeping up the
share of the market against those solutions? I believe @Edge network might
continue to require these appliances for WAF, Firewall/DPI (and other things I
don't know about)... but that'd be a niche?

[0] [http://opennetworking.org/](http://opennetworking.org/)

[1] [https://www.opnfv.org/](https://www.opnfv.org/)

[2] [https://opencord.org/](https://opencord.org/)

[3] [https://www.apstra.com/](https://www.apstra.com/)

~~~
joshAg
Not gonna lie, that question is almost not something i'm qualified to answer,
since I was more focused on specific ssl technologies/integrations, but I'll
have a go.

Obviously they won't go away, but network appliances definitely won't keep
their share because not everyone needs them as SDNs get better. I see the SDN
and IDN as mostly solving multivendor integration issues and making it easier
to configure at least semi-complicated networks, which doesn't make them a
drop-in replacement for many of the problems f5 is trying to solve. For
certain network loads they might achieve performance parity, too.

One of the draws for an f5 box for a large customer is that instead of having
like 5 vendors or OSS technologies that they have to maintain for load
balancing, ssl-termination, hardware-accelerated/-hardened
encryption/decryption, SAML, firewalls, etc. you have one company's product
(that hopefully has been designed to work well with itself) to do all of that
that's configured from one location. If you don't have to worry about that
multivendor orchestration headache, then massive network appliances like BIGIP
aren't a value add over having a couple vendors.

Another draw for BIGIP is doing things at the speed of packet flow or nearly
so even for VM containers and even for fully encrypted SSL. If you don't have
to care about making sure to squeeze every last microsecond of latency or
bandwidth out of you 10Gbs or 100Gbs fiber connection, BIGIP isn't a value add
over SDN. If you only care a little bit, than an SDN could be way cheaper than
BIGIP because you can configure things to do what you need for lower hardware
and support costs.

For the people who care about that multivendor issue and performance, they're
always going to have hardware dedicated to networking, even if they use SDNs
or IDNs, because they need that dedicated compute to achieve their goals.
Sustained 10Gbs connections are no joke, let alone 40Gbs or 100Gbs. Same with
tens of thousands of simultaneous SSL connections. All of a sudden you need
dedicated ASICS/"Raw Compute" and RAM to keep up with the firehose of packets.
Plus, network appliances will begin to integrate with SDNs and IDNs, so for
customers on the border between needing an appliance and a getting by with an
IDN or SDN and more manpower, the form of the network appliance will change,
but they're still going to have hardware down in their server room or compute
instances in their cloud dedicated to networking infra. If you want SSL-
termination? You need compute. Hardware accelerated or hardened SSL
termination? You need specialized hardware. Firewalls? Compute. SAML? Compute.
Complicated NATs? Compute. If you've got a couple BIGIPs in your server room,
your network's complicated enough and/or bandwidth heavy and/or low latency
enough that you're going to have nearly as much racks dedicated for your SDN
so that it has enough compute as you do for network appliances.

BIGIP isn't valuable because it's great a router or switch. It's great because
of how much it does on top of that in a single server/VM, and how well it does
it. And most of what it's great at are not things that an SDN will solve.
Sure, the configuration tweaking will have parity and maybe load balancing
performance (but having seen how BIGIP achieves it, especially for complicated
setups, i kinda doubt it). But if BIGIP integrates with SDNs or with IDNs even
just a little, then what could happen is that people on the borderline are
just going to get slightly smaller BIGIPs and offload some of the tasks where
BIGIP overlaps with SDNs/IDNs and the BIGIP will just be another node in the
SDN. If BIGIP goes in on SDN and IDN, then you might even see people buying
larger BIGIPs to orchestrate their overall SDN and IDN.

~~~
ignoramous
Thanks a lot!

------
clinta
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.

~~~
s_kilk
Throwing out a question to the room: if the worst happens and Nginx gets
butchered, would it be so bad to go back to using Apache? I've never used it
really, everything I've done has been Nginx, but is there some technical
reason why Apache wouldn't be a fine fallback option for an open-source
server?

~~~
user5994461
HaProxy does load balancing better, it never was a primary feature of nginx.
Varnish can do the caching. Apache/Lighttpd can serve files and CGI, but maybe
not as efficiently.

Apache is really struggling on resource consumption. It's still living in the
world of one process or one thread per connection.

Operationally it always ends up in a clusterfuck of rewrite rules and there
are many gotchas with undocumented and misbehaving directives.

~~~
jimjag
"It's still living in the world of one process or one thread per connection."

It hasn't lived in that world for a decade or so. It's great to give advice,
but at least make it valid and factual. With the Apache 2.4 event MPM, httpd
is async and event-driven and is just as fast as nginx.

~~~
user5994461
Apache is full of gotchas as stated. For one, the event MPM is not async :p

It's still creating multiple processes that get recycled periodically, each
with a fixed number of threads. Every active request holds a thread.

Apache quickly runs into troubles when having long lived requests (slow API
calls or large file downloads) or when using websockets (hold a thread
permanently).

The tuning to balance processes, threads, connections, requests and resource
consumption is extremely complicated and it doesn't get very far.

HAProxy and nginx can both handle 10k concurrent connections out of the box.
Apache requires extensive tuning before 1k.

------
hannasanarion
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".

~~~
sumoboy
Got to feel lucky Oracle or IBM didn't buy them, definitely would have run
them into the ground.

~~~
seunosewa
People thought Oracle would run MySQL into the ground, and that didn't happen.

~~~
hannasanarion
That's because Oracle was too busy suing Java users and pissing on
OpenSolaris. There's only so many open source projects a company can eradicate
at a time.

------
ClassAndBurn
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.

------
chx
"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...](https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-
releases/f5-acquires-nginx-to-bridge-netops-devops) what do we know of F5
history in open source?

~~~
raiyu
I think the issue is that there isn't much and certainly nginx could be viewed
as competitor to F5. And with everything else going on it's not difficult to
imagine that this acquisition isn't a positive sign.

~~~
jfindley
Could it, really? I know that nginx has some builtin load balancing, but
unless it's vastly vastly changed in the past few years, it's still a LONG way
behind haproxy for load balancing.

nginx is an excellent high performance webserver, which is something F5 don't
really have. It is (or was, at least) at best a mediocre load balancer, with
all sorts of limitations at the sort of scales you'd usually use an F5 box
for. While it's probably fair to wonder how much more work will be put into
the LB feature-set of nginx, I hope that this will be counterbalanced by
increased funding for the core feature of being a superlative webserver.

~~~
greglindahl
nginx's worse-than-F5-and-haproxy load balancing was great for where I was
using it. And from all reports, F5 would have required a full engineer to do
configuration, compared to about 1/4 of an engineer for nginx.

------
mattjaynes
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."

~~~
jlockhardt
NGINX is upset that AVI networks is winning all major the F5 replacement
business. I looked at NGINX in the past and the rep seemed hesitant to talk
about AVI vs NGINX. Seems to be true.
[https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi-
Networks-Doubles-Revenue-Customer-Base-Legacy)

~~~
gshulegaard
Having worked at NGINX, I would be surprised if Avi Networks was at all a
consideration for marketing F5 replacement. When I left (not too long ago),
most of our enterprise sales of NGINX+ was for F5 replacement deals...which is
why the marketing emphasis has always been on replacing F5.

As an engineer (so I can't speak to business strategy), I always thought of
Avi Networks as market validation for ancillary software services like Amplify
and Controller rather than a competitor with NGINX+. But that was just my
thinking.

------
eduren
F5 side of the press release: [https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-
releases/f5-acquires-n...](https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-
releases/f5-acquires-nginx-to-bridge-netops-devops)

------
ChikkaChiChi
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.

------
benfortuna
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.

------
ksajadi
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.

------
tootie
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.

------
dedalus
[https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/11/f5-acquires-nginx-
for-670m...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/11/f5-acquires-nginx-for-670m-to-
move-into-open-source-multi-cloud-services/) is a much better rationale and
details on how it went down

------
platform
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18337429)

[2][https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/bpf/docs/bpf-
docs#tools...](https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/bpf/docs/bpf-docs#tools-
built-on-bpf)

~~~
_wmd
BPF is 12 years older than Facebook :)

People don't buy individual pieces of technology, they want packaged solutions
that come with support. Tech almost matters less than good support

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

Up next is likely HaProxy....

~~~
jlockhardt
We replaced F5 with Avi Networks and we are a global fortune 500.

------
throw2016
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.

------
samstave
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)

------
pretty_titan
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.

------
bouncycastle
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!

~~~
Zircom
We use their VPN client at where I work...it's a mess. Disconnects all the
time, IF you can even get it to connect in the first place, it like's to sit
there for up to 20 minutes sometimes before it finally connects. Almost never
works with captive portals, and all sorts of syncing issues with our network
drives.

To be fair, it might just have to do with our company's implementation, our IT
department pretty hit or miss when it comes to implementing new stuff, it only
rolled our 6 months ago and we do have 30,000+ employees/contractors so I'd
imagine it's headache getting everything just right, but still.

------
buryat
what are some good alternatives to nginx?

~~~
skrowl
Obviously Apache, IIS

[https://caddyserver.com/](https://caddyserver.com/)

[https://www.lighttpd.net/](https://www.lighttpd.net/)

[https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/](https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/)

~~~
aquabeagle
Probably not that last one...

[https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/weblog/132](https://www.hiawatha-
webserver.org/weblog/132)

~~~
jtdev
Or IIS... yikes!

~~~
skrowl
Not all of us work in small startups. The enterprise needs webservers too!

~~~
fxfan
But Microsoft bad, everybody say so

------
k_vinogradov
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...](https://medium.com/runa-capital-collection/nginx-and-runa-
story-6e27e2a4ab5d) (from idea in 2002 to exit in 2019)

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

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

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

------
Ulixes
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 ...

------
tyingq
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.

~~~
pull_my_finger
Curious how you think Kong falls short of Nginx. Isn't it built on top of
Nginx via Openresty/ngx_lua?

~~~
fosk
Marco, CTO of Kong here. Kong is not only built on top of Nginx, but also
extends it significantly to provide features that Nginx doesn’t do out of the
box (dynamic configuration, SRV records resolution, dynamic Plugin based
system, data plane API and so on).

------
Rapzid
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?

------
KaiserPro
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.

~~~
laura2013
hey, can you provide a source for their decrease in market share? Or are you
assuming based on AWS growth? I tried looking up the Gartner starts but
couldn't get past a login.

~~~
KaiserPro
Sorry based on my own ignorance.

In 2014 we had two, then I moved company to where we had 6 loadbalancers, in
the four years we were there we killed them off with a mix of AWS and k8s

At most recent place, I'd no even consider installing them.

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

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

------
tannhaeuser
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.

~~~
zokier
nginx had very well performing event driven core from the get-go. Apache event
mpm module stabilized only in 2.4, and at that point nginx was already quite
popular.

------
rocky1138
Are we all going to move back to Apache httpd?

~~~
jimjag
Why not? Apache 2.4 with the Event MPM is async and event-driven, just as fast
as nginx, lower latency, more fully compliant w/ RFC specs, robust reverse
proxy w/ load balancing and dynamic configuration, super-fast caching,... and
fully and completely open source.

~~~
rocky1138
Hey you're preaching to the converted. Tbh I have no idea why we all moved
away in the first place. I was fine with Apache.

------
astrodust
Yeah, well, that was fun while it lasted.

------
purplezooey
Wonder how the other shareholders did.

------
monster2control
Terrible news

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

------
sexyflanders
lol

------
Chico11Kidlet
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.

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

------
hcknews_now
Is docker up next? Thoughts?

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

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Theodores
F5 Networks - never heard of them.

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

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jlockhardt
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...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi-
Networks-Doubles-Revenue-Customer-Base-Legacy)

