F5, the company behind the well-known NGINX open-source web server, has recently introduced a comprehensive solution for traffic management and security. This new offering, known as F5 NGINX Management Suite 1.0, aims to enhance control over fleets of NGINX instances for its customers. The suite includes a centralized dashboard, providing a holistic view and control over NGINX instances, application delivery services, API management workflows, and security solutions.

Apart from its capabilities as an HTTP server, NGINX can also serve as a proxy server for email (IMAP, POP3, and SMTP) and act as a reverse proxy and load balancer for HTTP, TCP, and UDP servers.

The F5 NGINX Management Suite 1.0 replaces the NGINX Controller, the company’s initial centralized management platform released in 2017. Recognizing the evolving needs of customers, F5 decided to reevaluate its approach to better address deployment ease, scalable management, and robust connectivity options for applications and APIs.

Jenn Gile, Senior Manager of Product Marketing for the NGINX group at F5, stated in a blog post that NGINX Controller fell short of meeting customers’ requirements. The decision was made to rearchitect it as a Linux native experience, but it became evident that this architecture was not suitable for the desired functionality. Consequently, F5 chose to shelve NGINX Controller and adopt a new strategy. The goal was to develop a suite of modules on a deployable platform that is both common and easy to deploy, capable of scaling for future use cases and supporting diverse customer environments.

The Instance Manager module, initially launched as a standalone product in 2021, serves as the core functionality of NGINX Management Suite. Situated within the control plane, Instance Manager streamlines configuration and maintenance of an NGINX fleet. This allows IT teams to monitor instances while providing a shared interface for DevOps teams to update configurations and certificates.

The API Connectivity Manager module in the Management Suite simplifies the complexity of governing and managing APIs in multi-cloud environments. It empowers centralized Ops teams with visibility and control over API traffic, while enabling developers to maintain agility and autonomy in delivering new services.

F5 has identified two key use cases for future development: App and API security, where the Management Suite will facilitate the use of NGINX App Protect WAF to secure apps and APIs with features like troubleshooting, insights, policy management, and event monitoring; and load balancing, where the App Delivery Manager module will allow the configuration, security, monitoring, and troubleshooting of NGINX Plus as a load balancer for applications.

Further details about the release can be found on the company’s blog site, and F5 is offering a 30-day trial of the new suite.