NGINX Open Source: Reflecting Back and Looking Ahead

Nginx Plus seems like they took a lot of the obvious feature upgrades, some which look fairly easy (remove cached item) and put them in a pay wall. Nothing <i>wrong</i> with that, just feels weird. And the pricing is enough to pay for a Windows license, not that IIS is even close to nginx (it&#x27;s reverse proxy capability is terrible).<p>I&#x27;m sad to hear about JS; I thought the work with Lua was going well and would be a better candidate. Maybe I misunderstand the situation.<p>Nginx is one of those great tech that just makes so much more easy in my life.

i guess tengine is getting more and more relevant then:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alibaba&#x2F;tengine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alibaba&#x2F;tengine</a><p>(though to be fair most work on new protocols seems to be from nginx itself)

I&#x27;ve been digging the last few months of blog posts that nginx has been putting out, especially the articles around microservices. They&#x27;re very well written and have inspired our company to think differently about a few of our applications. When we were offered the opportunity to talk with nginx directly for a private webinar, we were left with a very underwhelming feeling. It may have been the specific sales person, but they couldn&#x27;t explain how nginx&#x27;s paid services could help our company.

The question that you should always ask before going down an proprietary-add-ons business model is, what are you going to do the day someone develops the same functionality for the open source product, in a fundamentally different way? Are you going to rip out those parts every time you release your proprietary version? Because your customers are paying for those parts to be very stable.

td;rd: interesting things will move to the premium version, JS VM to power future versions, pluggable module API coming

&gt; we’re beginning the implementation of a pluggable module API<p>This is the most exciting for me, as I&#x27;d much rather install from a package than have to re-compile from source.<p>I&#x27;ve figured out how to make that easier in Debian&#x2F;Ubuntu: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;serversforhackers.com&#x2F;compiling-third-party-modules-into-nginx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;serversforhackers.com&#x2F;compiling-third-party-modules-...</a>, but having a command similar to Apache to enable&#x2F;disable a module will be <i>really</i> nice.

It&#x27;s annoying that they took SPDY support out of Community and put it into Plus. Want updates? Too bad, you gotta recompile.

Which JavaScript VM are they going to use?

No longer using nginx after plus became a product.