
Nginx Inc. raises $10M in Series B round - shad42
http://nginx.com/news/nginx-inc-raises-10m-series-b-round/
======
staunch
I've been using nginx for a very long time, but I am getting a bit nervous
about it. As an example, the nginx Plus feature of "Application health checks"
has me concerned. This is the feature that performs an HTTP request on a
backend server to determine if it is healthy.

That's such a simple and necessary feature of any reverse proxy that it should
obviously be included in the free version.

So, are they going to avoid ever implementing it in the free version? Would
they turn away patches to add that functionality? I know there was an open
source patch that never made it in, but I don't know why.

And what about staging/dev environments? Do you really have to pay full price
to get basic features for internal testing servers?

~~~
tinco
Just curious, do other reverse proxies have this feature? Why aren't you using
them?

To me this sounds like exactly the sort of feature that belongs in an
enterprise product. So simple it could be implemented with a shell script in
an hour or two by any competent sysadmin, and just out of being core
functionality.

The idea would be that by buying the enterprise product you save yourself the
time/money of being/hiring that competent sysadmin. How is that not
reasonable?

~~~
staunch
Yes, pretty much every reverse proxy supports this. Most other software sucks
in much bigger ways. And no this could not be done with a shell script.

~~~
Dobbs
Not easily, but this can be implemented by having NGINX proxy to Haproxy and
have Haproxy do the health checks.

Scales well enough.

------
logicallee
this is getting ridiculous, first mongo.db next nginx.

HEADLINES FROM NEXT WEEK:

 _cat_ raises $750M at valuation of $25B

The venerable gnu shell program 'cat', which is an integral part of 70 million
developers' toolchains and helps power shell scripts on 70% of the world's
Internet servers, has completed raising a seed round of $750M at a valuation
of $25B.

"We could have raised more", said Richard Stallman, "but by only parting with
3.3% we are leaving ourselves room to grow. More and more people are starting
to use Gnu/GNU utilities, and our eventual market base is 7 billion people. We
have no plans to monetize."

~~~
yeukhon
How is that ridiculous? Why can't nginx or MongoDB monetize its strength?

10gen was a startup and MongoDB was built to make money.

You can keep a project "open source" while offering enterprise level of
support. Look at Puppet, Chef and now Ansible.

The world needs business. Nginx is mature and actually deserve to run as a
business. The developers are already consultant for a long time; they just
want to monetize Nginx publicly, as a startup.

Are you afraid Nginx will become the next Microsoft Windows Server? I can't
predict future but with 100% of faith I say nginx will be fine in the next
several years.

I don't necessarily think free software == win.

~~~
voltagex_
If I'm a small business that can't afford "enterprise" pricing and nginx
starts stagnating because all of the effort has gone to nginx-plus, what then?

~~~
junker37
Then you choose another open source offering or fork nginx and start
implementing the features it's missing.

~~~
pbreit
And that totally sucks.

------
jakozaur
I wonder how this impact open source nginx... I guess they will rather keep
adding new things to Plus.

Seems less open source friendly business model than Trolltech (Qt), Red Hat,
MySQL...

~~~
tinco
Why? I work at a company with a similar business model, and it's benefited our
open source product tremendously.

~~~
jakozaur
Just to clarify: Any company which got open source model is awesome.

Just in that case transition may cause that they core product will not be
evolving as fast as we would wish. Without digging depth, things like
"Advanced load balancing" just in paid plan makes me anxious.

~~~
tinco
I can't speak for Nginx, but it seems to me their enterprise product is very
reliant on their open source product. Their customers will probably users of
the opensource product that seek a little extra.

If they would slip up and let another open source software be better than
their open source product it would eat in their customer base and eventually
cost them money.

This is why this business model is so awesome. It is both excellent for the
users, who benefit from having the core contributors be paid and highly
motivated to improve and maintain the project, and good for the contributors
who are finally able to work on the project they love without the distraction
of having to do other work for money.

That's not even mentioning side effects like the fact that paying customers
are more likely to give feedback and report bugs/missing features.

------
yeukhon
"NGINX is now used by 16% of all Web sites"

I wonder how much traffic are generated by this 16%? I would assume the
traffic will be more than 16%, probably above 50%.

~~~
chubot
I doubt it, because Google doesn't use nginx for anything public facing, and
I'm pretty sure Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft don't either. That
already counts for a huge chunk of internet traffic.

Nginx is good for relatively high traffic sites, but not so high traffic that
you have entire teams of engineers rolling your own load balancing!

~~~
yeukhon
Do you happen to know why they don't and what do they use? If they are using
Apache, I assume they have a custom version that is highly optimized.
[http://www.serverwatch.com/article.php/3911511/Google-
Speeds...](http://www.serverwatch.com/article.php/3911511/Google-Speeds-Up-
the-Web-with-Apache-Web-Server-Module.htm)

I guess for all fairness, yeah, let's only count public facing. I think with
internal proxy nginx will probably be even higher.

~~~
objclxt
> _Do you happen to know why they don 't and what do they use?_

Google originally used a modified version of Apache (and, as you have linked
to, contributed a module to it), but my understanding is the Google Web Server
is now so far removed from Apache it bears virtually no resemblance to it.

~~~
meowface
I wonder if they ever plan on open sourcing parts of their web server.

------
Touche
Recently switched to Apache largely because of Nginx Plus. I do wish them luck
with that project though.

~~~
jamespo
What scale are we talking about here, a home server or an enterprise
deployment?

~~~
Touche
Home servers and hobby projects. So scale is tiny.

------
batgaijin
If you are looking for the future of http server stuff look no further than:
[http://mew.org/~kazu/proj/mighttpd/en/](http://mew.org/~kazu/proj/mighttpd/en/)

~~~
recuter
I don't understand why a minimalistic Haskell server (while neat) is the
"future of http server stuff". While I'm glad it puts up similar benchmark
numbers to Nginx, what reason is there to switch?

Nginx is plenty stable despite not being written in Haskell.

~~~
batgaijin
Yeah but you don't want people knowing you don't have the monads to handle
their http requests.

------
gmjosack
I know that they plan to add dynamically loaded module support in a future
release. As long as they don't plan to keep that feature as an Nginx Plus
feature then I don't see much to be concerned about.

As it stands right now, a lot of users aren't able to make use of 3rd party
modules because of the overhead (recompiling). Once dynamic modules are
supported the community should be able to fill in the most desired features.

~~~
raptium
Taobao's fork supports dynamic module loading with other enhancements.
[http://tengine.taobao.org/](http://tengine.taobao.org/)

------
dschiptsov
Nginx Inc without mr. Sysoev is just a support company.)

There were rumors that he had plans to rewrite big parts of the server, so-
called nginx2. If this Nginx Plus is what they would do instead, that is pity.

In my humble opinion, while nginx/core is brilliant the module system is over-
engineered and too complicated, and there are lot of room for improvements.

~~~
justincormack
He was describing the outlines of Nginx2 just the other week at a conference
so it is still happening.

