F5 Networks has introduced NGINX Controller 3.0, a cloud-native application delivery solution to help organisations increase business agility, mitigate risk, and enhance their customers’ digital experiences. Built to unleash productivity and efficiency, the 3.x series offers the first multi-cloud, self-service platform that removes the friction between DevOps, NetOps, SecOps, and app developers.
NGINX Controller combines a broad set of app services, including load balancing, API management, analytics, and service mesh with an application-centric approach. As a result, it reduces the tool sprawl that thwarts organisations’ efforts to speed their application deployments. Further, it provides significant performance and insights along with a lower total cost of ownership.
As a cloud-agnostic solution, NGINX Controller empowers customers to easily deliver and automate a more comprehensive, consistent set of app services across multi-cloud deployments. DevOps teams will appreciate NGINX Controller’s integrations with key CI/CD tool vendors like Ansible and Datadog. The developer portal provides a view into documentation for APIs published through Controller, while the built-in certificate manager stores SSL/TLS certificates securely for easy association with applications.
And, it mitigates the significant capital and operational costs of tool sprawl that so many enterprises are challenged by today. Not only can Controller support organisations as they move into new clouds or adopt new technologies by simplifying and accelerating modern app deployments, it also helps drive business growth.
Traditional application delivery and API management solutions are often more tuned to the underlying infrastructure than the applications themselves, leading to difficulty in managing app performance and maintaining app visibility. With NGINX Controller 3.0, customers can achieve productivity and efficiency gains for modern app-focused teams while assuring appropriate governance. DevOps, NetOps, SecOps, and AppDev personnel enjoy self-service management and monitoring for their own apps based on role, as well as orchestrated workflows that promote seamless collaboration across functional teams.
As they look to understand application health and performance in an easy-to-consume manner, they’ll find an intuitive dashboard populated with real-time, app-centric data.
NGINX Controller provides valuable analytics and insights to help applications adapt, protect, heal, and drive business results, including thresholds tied to uptime and performance. This gives teams the intelligence to not only improve app performance based on current conditions, but also to incorporate learnings and trend analysis into ongoing development cycles.
The result is a significant reduction in the time it takes to update an application for expanded use cases, or to add security features based on new threats. Users can obtain historical metrics and view events using an API, another design decision made to optimise the DevOps experience. In addition, flexible storage options are available to ensure that analytics data is always accessible when and where needed, even when disruptions occur.
These capabilities provide increased visibility across associated performance metrics so customers can deliver traditional and modern applications at scale.
“This is our first major product introduction since we joined forces with F5 in May, and it highlights the unique value proposition of NGINX and F5 together,” said Gus Robertson, SVP and GM of NGINX at F5. “Controller 3.0 provides the foundation for developer and DevOps self-service, at scale. We’ve designed the user experience to be entered on the asset that businesses care about most: their apps. This is a big departure from previous infrastructure-centric solutions. Plus, customers’ apps can now be configured by a new API. We’re excited to hit this major milestone. Stay tuned as we continue adding value in each monthly release.”