Interesting to see a different kind of MCP server here - one that can kind of be a reverse proxy for multiple servers and then pipe that data to a LLM for processing. In theory, at least, this looks potentially valuable and worth of an experiment.
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.
I guess this[1] image from the F5 article gives an idea of where nginx fits from their perspective. F5 is a huge company (4000~ employees) that already likely has thousands of boxes running nginx. If you're going to continue using nginx as a critical piece of your business you might as well secure its future.
Which is an interesting statement given that everyone I've run into associated with F5 - local reps or users - have been relentlessly hostile to "open source crap".
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."
What's fascinating is how fast the washington post is, and how you get different image types depending on the browser you use. Off to check out that CDN provider they use.
