Nginx: managing monolithic app traffic is an API game

Nginx is the company that likes to be called NGINX, except it’s not… because it’s not an acronym, it’s supposed to say “engine-X”, which is a cool snazzy name, right?

Actually, Nginx would only ever rank as Nginx, because almost all reputable press outlets only allow acronyms up to a maximum of three letters.

There’s always an exception that proves the rule and SuSE might be the fly in the ointment. Or could it be TIBCo (who would prefer we say TIBCO, for The Information Bus Company) that makes this an imperfect rule?

Either way, it’s tough to read NGINX news without automatically self-editing yourself back to Nginx, which might be a shame… because the firm’s application delivery platform has just been augmented with by availability of its API management module for Nginx Controller.

Nginx controller manages application and web server performance. The API controller is special (Nginx would say ‘unique’) in that it is capable of separating runtime (day-to-day) traffic from management traffic, which is (very arguably) rather neat when we look at the amount of reliance web-connected firms are placing on API management and the need there now is to improve API response times.

“The Nginx API management solution enables infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams to define and publish APIs, manage traffic to and secure backend applications, monitor performance issues and analyse API usage,” notes the company, in a press statement.

Nginx API Management Module is built on an architecture that provides control‑plane functionality with Nginx Plus, an API gateway.

The firm reminds us that Nginx is also a component in many traditional API management solutions, providing the underlying gateway for Axway, IBM DataPower, Kong, MuleSoft, Red Hat 3Scale, and others.

This technology provides what is said to be a ‘simple interface’ to define APIs, manage upstream groups and backend servers, route resources to upstreams, and publish the resulting API definitions to Nginx Plus gateways.

Both Nginx Controller and Nginx Plus are flexible and can be deployed on any environment due to their small footprint – bare metal, VMs, containers, and public, private and hybrid clouds.