Sicra and NGINX

Sicra now offers support for NGINX

NGINX is a highly popular open-source web server that was made available in 2004. Since then, the project has evolved to become the most adopted solution for web solutions. NGINX offers scalable and highly available web server, reverse proxy, and web acceleration. The majority of the world's busiest websites use the solution, and it often plays a role in modern development projects. There are approximately 130,000 Norwegian websites that use NGINX Open Source as a Web Server and/or Reverse Proxy. In 2019, F5 acquired NGINX, and the solution continues as open source. F5 offers support and builds on more advanced functionality for those who need, for example, increased application security. This is offered as a licensed version. Together with F5, we now deliver support to the Norwegian market.

Sicra has a competent environment working with load balancing, application firewalling, authentication, identity brokering, federation, and customization based on the ADC platforms NetScaler and BigIp. Much of this functionality is relevant and useful for local data centers and hybrid configurations. For development environments and cloud-native projects, NGINX is often a component to provide the desired functionality. We are now expanding this environment to include NGINX expertise.

A bit about NGINX

The licensed version of NGINX is called NGINX Plus. This version has functionality built on top of open source and offers configuration via API and active health monitoring.

The NGINX Application Platform consists of various software modules that all contribute to improving modern applications and simplifying their development. All NGINX modules are characterized by the following:

• High performance

• Optimized code that takes up little space (low footprint), is quick to start up, and easy to update

• Can run on "bare metal," virtual machine, container, Kubernetes / Openshift Ingress Controller, and Sidecar Proxy for Microservices

• Easy to automate as part of the CI/CD pipeline

• Delivered as subscription licenses with 24/7 support included

NGINX Plus can be used as a web server, reverse proxy, content cache, and rate shaping unit. NGINX Plus includes everything found in the popular Open Source version and also has features such as Session Persistence, configuration via API, service monitoring, and active health checks. NGINX Plus also offers API Gateway functionality with very high performance.

NGINX App Protect is an advanced WAF module for NGINX Plus. This is based on F5's market-leading WAF known from the BIG-IP platform, and WAF policies can be transferred between these platforms.

NGINX App Protect provides far more opportunities to secure web applications and APIs than what is possible using the Open Source alternative Modsecurity, which also forms the basis for Azure WAF and AWS WAF. It shows that NGINX App Protect also has much better performance (less CPU usage) than the mentioned alternatives.

NGINX Controller is a centralized monitoring and configuration tool for hundreds of NGINX instances, providing statistics and health information for each application published on these NGINX instances. Here you can choose to use the Web GUI or REST API to retrieve all statistics. This can also be a central point for automation (CI/CD). NGINX can also be used for API Management together with NGINX Plus as an API Gateway.

NGINX Unit is a dynamic application server that supports code such as Go, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. You can also use different versions of, for example, PHP and Python on the same NGINX Unit instance. NGINX Unit is managed using REST and JSON.

Contact Sicra if you want to know more about the solutions or need support or consulting assistance.