014 NGINX: A Smart Middle Man Between Your App and Your Users, with Kevin Jones

Kevin Jones talks about "NGINX: a smart middle man between your app and your users" in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light. Kevin is one of the speakers for the upcoming Into The Box  ColdFusion Conference, where he will talk about Using NGINX as an Effective and Highly Available Content Cache. In his ITB talk, he wants people to understand what NGINX means and the powerful features contained in the platform that can be used in building an HTTP caching layer, and why NGINX is often used as a framework to build powerful, scalable and highly available content delivery networks. "Right now there's about 350 million known websites on the internet today that use NGINX, so it has a really, really large footprint. It's widely adopted in the community, and now NGINX is a company. So, we've built NGINX Plus, which is a commercial version on top of that open source version, so we kind of handle both sides of the matrix." - Kevin Jones Show notes What is NGINX? A smart middleman between your app and your users Good for DevOps But it is not a network firewall, but be used to build a web application firewall When you should be using it A 10-year history and the hockey stick growth in features happening right How it works with Docker containerization and microservices Application Delivery Controller (ADC) - virtualized load balancer Round Robin Least Response Time Least Connections Requeuing of request How it can implement smart Layer 7 Security fast API gateways in your DMZ Blocking by IP, subnets, ports Authentication Protections for Denial Of Service attacks Metered access Country blocking The value of virtual proxy software The power of NGINscript (JavaScript-like language) What are you looking forward to at Into The Box? Mentioned in this episode NGINX  Virtual web server Open source and commercial versions Igor Sysoev CTO, based in Russia TPC UDP SSL optimization Asynchronous non-blocking architecture Shared memory zones for all the workers Load balancing GUIP Proxy HTTP via proxy HTTP caching Streaming media Layer 7 Security Listen to the Audio   Bio Kevin Jones Kevin Jones is a Technical Solutions Architect at NGINX, where he specializes in the integration and implementation of NGINX for various companies around the world. He has a strong background in infrastructure management, application monitoring, and troubleshooting. Links Blog Twitter Interview transcript Michaela Light:                 Welcome back to the podcast. I'm here with Kevin Jones, from NGINX, and he's going to be talking about the past, present, and future of the modern web using NGINX, which, as I understand it, is kind of like a virtual middle man between your app and the users of your app, and it has lots of applications. So, we're going to be looking at what it is, when you should be using it, looking at the 10-year history of it, and the hockey stick growth in feet just that's happening right now with it, how it works with docker containerization and microservices, application delivery controller, virtualized load balances, how it can implement smart layer seven security fast, the value of having a virtual proxy software with the power of engine stripped to let you customize it. And welcome, Kevin. Kevin Jones:                      Thank you. Nice to talk to you. Michaela Light:                 Yeah. So, what exactly is NGINX? Kevin Jones:                      Yeah, so NGINX has been around for a while. It's been around since 2007. It's actually originally an open source project, and still is an open source project, and essentially it's a lot of things. Essentially it's a web server, it's a reverse proxy, it can do HTTP caching, and it can also do load balancing of traffic, and it can also do TCP and UDP traffic as well, proxying. So, it's commonly used to do security control of web applications, being able to control access to those web applications. It can also do live video streaming, media streaming, and then, as I mentioned before, it can be used to serve static files as well. So, it's commonly used. Right now there's about 350 million known websites on the internet today that use NGINX, so it has a really, really large footprint. It's widely adopted in the community, and now NGINX is a company. So, we've built NGINX Plus, which is a commercial version on top of that open source version, so we kind of handle both sides of the matrix. Michaela Light:                 So, it's a startup company. How many people work there? Kevin Jones:                      Yeah, so we're rather small right now. A lot of people hear NGINX and they hear the 350 million websites and they think, "Oh, it must be this huge company." But we actually only have about 150 employees right, so we're just really hitting the ground running and growing. We've grown a lot. I think when I got hired I was number 50, so in the past two years we've hired about 100 employees. Yeah. Michaela Light:                 Well, something must be going right. Kevin Jones:                      Yeah, definitely, definitely. Read more   And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist. Michaela Light is the host of the CF Alive Podcast and has interviewed more than 100 ColdFusion experts. In each interview, she asks "What Would It Take to make CF more alive this year?" The answers still inspire her to continue to write and interview new speakers. Michaela has been programming in ColdFusion for more than 20 years. She founded TeraTech in 1989. The company specializes in ColdFusion application development, security and optimization. She has also founded the CFUnited Conference and runs the annual State of the CF Union Survey.