NGINX Plus is a trusted, supported & secured platform for Application Delivery. NGINX Plus combines web server with load balancer, content cache, and media deliver into a high performance Application Deliver Platform (ADP).

NGINX Plus as a crucial component of application delivery platform plays a key role in serving the modern web:
Microservices : Microservices is a methodology for scaling applications by breaking them down into a suite of small independent services. NGINX Plus helps bind these services together. It gives you a single entry point into your microservices architecture.
As that entry point, NGINX Plus terminates SSL connections, mitigates DDoS attacks, checks access privileges, and caches responses from the individual services. NGINX Plus gives you a layer of both security and optimization for your microservices application.

Containers : Containers are transient by design, NGINX gives you a stable entry point into your constantly changing containerized application.  Clients connect to NGINX Plus as entry point forwards them to the most appropriate container instance.  In addition NGINX Plus can terminate SSL connections, cache responses, etc.
DevOps : DevOps is a cultural shift from traditional philosophy to a more collaborative relationship between development and operations. DevOps is often characterized by tools around automation and monitoring. NGINX is a natural fit into a DevOps environment and works with almost every DevOps tool out there from Puppet to Jenkins to Datadog.
CI/CD : Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are practices of automating the process from developers checking in new code to when that code is put in production. NGINX fits naturally into CI/CD workflows. The NGINX Plus configuration can be checked in to the same repository as the rest of your code. Changes to NGINX can flow through from check-in to production using the same CI/CD workflow as the rest of your application.
APIs : NGINX Plus can act as the API Gateway for your APIs. NGINX Plus sits in front of your APIs and can check and limit access, limit requests per user, and cache responses to improve overall performance.

Nginx Plus Release 7
The latest Nginx Plus Release 7 fully supports implementation of new HTTP/2 web standard. It translates HTTP/2 into a protocol that existing application server can also understand and for older browser, using NPN, it can support HTTP/2 along with HTTP/1.x as well. HTTP/2 provides better performance through connection multiplexing, single connection, binary header encoding, and header compression.
In addition to HTTP/2 support, Release 7 has many new and updated features :

• Improved performance: NGINX Plus R7 now includes Socket Sharding and Thread Pools. Socket sharding optimization helps to improve the performance up to 3x for workloads with short lived connections and also helps in improved server performance.  Thread Pools help to improve performance up to 9x for disk based workloads such as caching or serving static content.
• Access control and security enhancements: Support for NTLM authentication means NGINX Plus can be deployed in front of legacy Microsoft applications. Through TCP Load balancing feature you can limit connections that a client can keep open at a time. Access controls feature helps to quickly block malicious IPs and Bandwidth Limits feature can be configured to limit client upload and download speed.
• Improved management and diagnostics with additional Counters: NGINX Plus adds even more detailed monitoring and statistics data to the existing status and dashboard tools. Key new counters are – SSL Handshakes, SSL session reused, Queue overflows, NGINX reloads.
• Updated, and Significantly enhanced Dashboard: NGINX Plus’ status dashboard has been significantly enhanced, it now provides a tabbed interface which gives more detailed view of NGINX performance and health. This helps organizations to identify problems with their setup and make corrective changes to their configurations.

In Summary, the new and updated features in NGINX Plus R7 provides:

• Fully supported HTTP/2 implementation
• Socket sharding and thread pools
• NTLM support for Microsoft applications and enhanced security for TCP applications.
• Improved monitoring and diagnostics with additional counters
• Significantly enhanced Dashboards

– Sandeep Khuperkar I CTO and Director, Ashnik

Sandeep is the Director and CTO at Ashnik. He brings more than 21 years of Industry experience (most of it spans across Red Hat & IBM India), with 14+ years in open source and building open source and Linux business model. He is on Advisory Board of JJMCollege of Engineering (Electronics Dept.)  And visiting lecturer with few of Engineering colleges and works towards enabling them on open source technologies. He is author, Enthusiast and community moderator at Opensource.com. He is also member of Open Source Initiative, Linux Foundation and Open Source Consortium Of India.