NGINX Sprint China 2022 Conference: Embracing open source to help modernize applications

Recently, the NGINX Sprint China 2022 conference was held online, and F5 announced the launch of three major initiatives to lead the development of China's open source industry and help Chinese users seize competitive opportunities in the wave of application modernization.

As the largest online flagship conference of F5 NGINX China throughout the year, this conference invited industry leaders and technical experts to share the latest developments of hot industry trends and NGINX, and to conduct in-depth discussions on industry cases and best practices related to NGINX and more popular open source projects. F5 Vice President and General Manager of NGINX Product Division Rob Whiteley, General Manager of F5 NGINX China Software Division Zhang Shu, Deputy Director of Open Source and Software Security Department of Cloud Computing Institute of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology Guo Xue and other guests attended the conference and delivered speeches.

Grasping the trend: Application modernization has gone through three waves

Open source software will continue to change the world, and more and more applications will be built using open source code. NGINX has played a vital role in the rise and success of open source. Rob Whiteley, vice president of F5 and general manager of NGINX Product Division, said: Today, more than half (55%) of the world's websites are running on NGINX, and almost the same proportion (53.7%) of Chinese websites are running on NGINX open source version. It is precisely because NGINX has always been committed to openness and integration that it has achieved these achievements.

Driven by digital technology, application modernization is becoming a trend and consensus in industrial development. NGINX believes that the development from traditional applications to modern applications will go through three waves: the first wave achieved large-scale concurrency and expansion of applications, and the second wave we are experiencing now is characterized by the decoupling of applications into microservices and connecting them through APIs.

At this stage, enterprises have higher requirements for security and K8s production environment, and NGINX is committed to providing cloud-native, K8s-friendly open source and commercial solutions to support important applications and APIs by providing scalability, visibility, security and governance capabilities.

This wave will greatly promote the development of automation technology, and applications that can sense and control and change on demand will also emerge. In other words, in the near future, the world will usher in the third wave marked by adaptive applications that can sense and control and do not require human intervention.

In the coming year, NGINX will work in three directions: innovate project governance and community management methods, present a modern look, continuously optimize the developer experience, and accelerate the expansion of NGINX's functions to create a complete NGINX application and supporting function stack to manage and operate modern applications at scale. NGINX will incubate more open source projects and become more open and integrated.

Important release: Three major measures to help the journey of modern applications

China has become an important force in the global open source system, and at the same time, China's application modernization is also developing rapidly. Because of this, NGINX has launched three major initiatives to meet the needs of local developers and enterprise users, which not only promote the development of China's open source industry, but also help core developers deploy modern applications more efficiently and easily.

Better open source services

NGINX hopes to build better enterprise-level services around open source products. Initiated by a Chinese team and soon to be used in other parts of the world, NGINX Enterprise Edition is based on the trusted open source project NGINX Open Source Edition certified by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. Based on its open source, stable, lightweight, flexible, and high-performance features, it provides users with enterprise-level technical support services, fundamentally changing the traditional dilemma of difficult governance, lack of support, and nowhere to turn for help for open source products. In addition, NGINX Enterprise Edition supports a series of services such as free superposition of professional consultants and customized development for more professional application scenarios and more complex usage needs of enterprise users.

In addition, NGINX also launched another innovative product - NGINX Management Suite, a unified traffic management and security protection solution for NGINX instance clusters. Its important component, NGINX Instance Manager, can track and manage NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source instances at the same time, helping developers to promptly identify configuration problems and obtain repair suggestions.

As NGINX's market share in the Web server talent market continues to rise, in order to better improve the professional level of open source software developers and provide important and scientific reference standards for corporate talent selection and recruitment, NGINX has specially launched an official certification level test. The certificate is issued by NGINX's global headquarters and is divided into three levels: NAA Junior, NAA Intermediate and NAE Advanced, to help certificate holders stand out from the crowd of applicants.

More open source community input

The development of open source is inseparable from the community, which plays an important role in promoting the concept of open source and encouraging developers to communicate, participate and contribute. Therefore, NGINX is determined to increase its investment in the open source community, promote open source innovation and adhere to open source best practices, and support and cultivate a more vigorous open source force.

In 2023, the new NGINX Chinese community website will be officially launched, bringing a more modern and user-friendly UI, an optimized editor, and more interactive content, including exciting features such as daily tasks, event task bounties, and new sections such as slacking off areas, recruitment and workplaces, to build a more influential and active industry sharing and communication platform for developers, to achieve mutual success with developers, and to jointly promote the development of open source.

In order to help Chinese developers improve their open source technology, NGINX has also been providing free learning resources for developers. So far, it has completed the translation of more than 100 English blog posts, and has translated the popular e-books "Kubernetes: From Testing to Production" and "NGINX Real-Time API Handbook" into Chinese. In the new year, in addition to blog posts, NGINX will also provide the Chinese community with more high-quality Chinese reference materials such as the latest version of "NGINX Complete Guide" published by O'Reilly and "Deploying NGINX as an API Gateway".

Broader open source ecosystem cooperation

NGINX will continue to work with CAICT to help Chinese enterprise customers choose truly trusted open source products. It will also work with application developers in various industries to help them build modern applications based on four pillars and six principles.

Due to its outstanding contribution to building a good open source ecosystem, NGINX has been named "OSCHINA Outstanding Open Source Technology Team of the Year" for two consecutive years by Open Source China. Open Source China is currently the largest open source technology community in China, bringing together the country's top open source project teams with strong technical capabilities. This award represents the industry's recognition and affirmation of NGINX.

At the same time, the latest version 1.0.0 of the NGINX Modern Application Reference Architecture (MARA) was officially released to build an application management and deployment ecosystem around NGINX. The architecture adopts a modular approach and provides free and open source modular components. These components are pre-configured and integrated to make the modern application building process simpler, more reliable and more automatic. NGINX also looks forward to working with more manufacturers and developers in the industry to jointly create a modern application reference architecture that adapts to different production environments.

Demonstrating strength: Empowering developers and enterprises with product power

In addition to the above three major initiatives, NGINX’s full product portfolio was also officially unveiled at this conference: in the open source field, there is not only the most classic NGINX open source version, but also the NGINX Enterprise Edition with added professional service support, and the newly released NGINX Modern Application Reference Architecture (MARA) 1.0 version; for enterprise applications, it includes NGINX Plus, NGINX Management Suite and other products and solutions.

Through these product combinations, NGINX can not only help users better use Kubernetes networks to reduce complexity, enhance security, and improve scalability, but also provide important tools for API protection, management, version control, and deprecation, and provide Kubernetes boundaries with technology that automatically connects to the outside world, thereby building high-performance, stable, reliable, secure, and scalable applications and APIs.

Zhang Shu, General Manager of F5 NGINX China Software Division, said: Today, cloud native has ushered in the era of modern applications. NGINX is committed to helping developers deploy modern applications more efficiently and easily, and providing a reliable foundation for building modern applications. In the future, we hope to provide better developer experience with better products and services, and actively participate in the open source community and open source co-construction of partners. At the same time, we also hope to cooperate with more local cloud vendors, exchange experiences with each other, and help users easily deploy and use NGINX in a variety of environments. I hope that with everyone's joint efforts, more open source projects can be incubated to create a new future for open source.