NGINX, Inc., the engine delivering sites and applications for the modern web, today announced the availability of NGINX Plus Release 9 (R9), the latest release of its application delivery platform. Today’s updates provide significant new features for NGINX’s innovative community of users, including the ability to dynamically install rich extensions to NGINX Plus, the inclusion of commercially-supported UDP load balancing, and new, more flexible pricing and support options.

“NGINX Plus is in use by thousands of applications across incredibly diverse use cases – from traditional enterprise applications to the most modern mobile and IoT systems, and within companies ranging from the smallest startups to the Fortune 500,” said Gus Robertson, CEO at NGINX, Inc. “Our rapid growth is the result of our commitment to performance, adaptability, security, and ease of use. The addition of these capabilities to NGINX Plus R9, and our new flexible support and pricing models, ensures that NGINX Plus continues to be the ideal application delivery platform for every modern-day company, and any application today.“

The key new features in NGINX Plus R9 include:

  • Dynamic modules – The introduction of dynamic modules in NGINX Plus R9 allows NGINX to be extended at runtime. Customers can now select the extensions they want, and install them directly from NGINX’s managed module repository, accessible via standard package management tools such as apt and yum. Over time NGINX will be distributing an ever-growing set of tested and fully certified extensions for its software.

The most popular NGINX-authored and third-party modules, such as support for the Lua programming language, have already been converted to the new dynamically loadable format. The company also published instructions for third party module owners to convert their modules to the new dynamic format, which is required before modules can be added to the NGINX repository.

  • UDP load balancing – In addition to existing support for TCP and HTTP load balancing, NGINX Plus can now load balance UDP applications. Support was added to the open source NGINX version last month. Advanced features in NGINX Plus include health checks, extended status monitoring, and on-the-fly reconfiguration.

UDP is quickly emerging as one of the protocols-of-choice for new Internet of Things (IoT) applications due to its low-bandwidth requirements. For today’s digital businesses, UDP ensures the highest-level of application and web performance for organizations that hope to capitalize on the rise of large volumes of traffic and data generated by the IoT. UDP is also used for DNS, syslog, RADIUS and other ubiquitous services. NGINX Plus can deliver and load balance these existing and new applications with ease.

  • NGINX Plus App Pricing – To ensure maximum performance and uptime during high growth, seasonality, or elastic traffic, many applications require dynamic infrastructure. Paying per instance or machine hour for software no longer makes sense for delivering the flexibility or cost effectiveness required by these modern apps, so NGINX has introduced NGINX Plus App Pricing.

This new pricing structure provides “all you can eat” usage of NGINX Plus’ extended capabilities and commercially-supported binaries for one flat-rate price per application, per year. No matter how many VMs, containers, nodes, concurrent connections, or users, customers will pay one low rate for the entire year.

NGINX Plus can now also be purchased with three different support levels; Basic 9×5 support for non-production applications, Professional 24×7 support via phone or email, and Enterprise 24×7 support with a guaranteed 30-minute or less response time.

The latest updates in R9 also builds on NGINX Plus’ reputation for performance and flexibility with the addition of support for DNS SRV records as upstreams for load balancing, further improvements to cache performance, and the ability to perform DNS lookups over TCP.

For a full list and descriptions of new features, please visit: https://www.nginx.com/resources/admin-guide/nginx-plus-releases/

To learn more about NGINX Plus R9, please visit: https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-plus-r9-released/