NGINX, a specialist in delivering sites and applications for the Web, announced the availability of Plus Release 9 (R9), the latest release of its application delivery platform.
The introduction of dynamic modules in Plus R9 allows the platform to be extended at runtime. Customers can now select the extensions they want, and install them directly from NGINX’s managed module repository.
“Technology is changing quickly with new solutions and architectures being developed, which creates a great challenge for users,” Owen Garrett, head of products at NGINX, told eWEEK. “NGINX is a stable, reliable and trusted component in modern application architectures, with a great support network–community and official–and a growing range of features that are tailored for the needs of modern applications.”
In addition to existing support for TCP and HTTP load balancing, NGINX Plus can now load balance UDP applications. Support was added to the open source NGINX version last month.
Advanced features in NGINX Plus include health checks, extended status monitoring, and on-the-fly reconfiguration.
“We regard user friendliness as one of the key values of NGINX,” Garrett said. “To us, that means consistency, reliability, honesty and community. As we build out the NGINX and NGINX Plus platforms, users can rely on these attributes as they create innovative solutions. We reduce their risk and time-to-market.”
The latest updates in R9 also build on NGINX Plus’ capabilities for flexibility with the addition of support for DNS SRV records as up-streams for load balancing, further improvements to cache performance, and the ability to perform DNS lookups over TCP.
“Despite some organizations still holding on to hardware-specific solutions, the transition to a 100 percent software infrastructure is more-or-less complete for the majority of modern application use cases,” Garrett said. “Of course hardware is necessary to run an application, but it’s a commodity and the dependencies that an application has in order to operate are all software.”
NGINX Plus can now be purchased with three different support levels; Basic 9×5 support for non-production applications, Professional 24×7 support via phone or email, and Enterprise 24×7 support with a guaranteed 30-minute or less response time.
“Application delivery was one of the last beachheads to transition to a completely software basis. The requirements of high-performance SSL and massive scalability are much more cost-effectively solved by software than specialized hardware,” Garrett said. “Application delivery will percolate throughout the infrastructure; you can regard it as being the next operating system layer for modern web applications.”