NGINX’s Application Delivery Platform Adds New OAuth Authentication and Improved Tools for a More Seamless User Experience
San Francisco – January 19, 2016 – NGINX, Inc., the engine delivering sites and applications for the modern web, today announced the availability of NGINX Plus R8, the latest release of its application delivery platform. The update provides even more features to improve the delivery and operation of complex and high-performance web applications.
This latest update provides an initial release of OAuth-based authentication, the industry standard for authentication and authorisation. OAuth enables Single Sign On capabilities for applications, as well as access controls for APIs. Organisations can use NGINX Plus to offload OAuth processing from applications servers, allowing for more efficient utilisation of infrastructure, as well as developer time.
Many of today’s most popular sites and applications, like Spotify and Airbnb, use OAuth authentication to allow users to easily leverage existing credentials from an authorisation server, such as Facebook or Google. For end users, OAuth greatly improves the user experience by eliminating the need to maintain separate usernames and passwords for a multitude of websites. It also means more seamless and rapid access to applications, which is crucial for obtaining and keeping users in today’s fast-paced web environment. NGINX Plus is ideally placed to handle the burden of authenticating requests and simplifying the identity implementation in the business logic.
“With both user expectation and competition high, developers and organisations must deliver their applications with the maximum performance and uptime, or risk losing out to a competitor who can,” said Gus Robertson, CEO at NGINX, Inc. “Our biggest priority is always making flawless application delivery easy for our customers, and with our latest update, we have added tools and features to empower these organisations to provide a seamless user experience and to ensure they can meet the demand of consumers and this new modern web.”
In addition to OAuth authentication, the latest update also adds several new and updated features to ensure organisations can deliver their applications with the performance, security, and reliability required for modern enterprise applications:
OAuth Technology Preview: As a reverse proxy and load balancer, NGINX Plus sits in front of the application and is ideally positioned to simplify application development by offloading the OAuth processing from application servers. In this technology preview in R8, NGINX is sharing a candidate implementation of OAuth to help users offload and streamline complex authentication tasks from microservice application components.
Production-Ready HTTP/2: In its previous release from September 2015, NGINX Plus R7, NGINX introduced support for HTTP/2. This support came less than seven months after the protocol was ratified, and NGINX is now the #1 web server for HTTP/2. Since then, the company has continued working hard to improve the implementation. With the latest release, NGINX now provides a fully production ready and hardened implementation of the new HTTP/2 web standard.
HTTP/2 improves performance of websites by up to 30%. With NGINX Plus R8, organisations can continue to add HTTP/2 support to their new and existing sites with no changes required to their application.
Persistent On-the-Fly Reconfiguration API: With the on-the-fly reconfiguration API in NGINX Plus, organisations are able to add or remove upstream servers without restarting NGINX Plus. This a great feature for auto-scaling and service discovery, enabling customers to modify the load balancing pool on demand. Starting with R8, the changes customers make on the fly persist across a restart or configuration reload.
This update to the API lets organisations make permanent changes to their NGINX Plus load-balancing configuration, adding and removing servers and changing their load balancing priorities. Using this easily-secured API, changes can be made as frequently as needed.
Scalable Caching for Large Video Files: With NGINX Plus R8 also comes an improved scalable content cache to better handle large video files, such as HTML5 video. Rather than store the entire video file as a single cache entry, NGINX Plus breaks it up into smaller fragments and then caches those fragments. Structuring the cache in this way better aligns to how users consume video on the Internet (fast forwarding, ending early, etc.), and reduces user latency as well as network traffic to and from origin servers.
Over the past year, adoption of NGINX has grown considerably and consistently. In 2015, NGINX became the #1 web server in the top 100,000 websites, with nearly half of the world’s busiest sites using NGINX to deliver their experiences to billions of users. NGINX, Inc. continues to invest heavily in both its open source and commercially supported tools to make flawless application delivery easy for everyone – from the smallest, lightest apps to the world’s largest online platforms and experiences.
To learn more about NGINX Plus R8 and its features visit:
https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-plus-r8-released/
