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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

unrelated but ive always thought the F5 acquisition of NGINX made little sense. I think F5 saw the writing on the wall a little late, panicked, and bought the first competitor they could come up with that showed up in a Gartner quadrant.

so much of the NGINX product that aligns with F5 as a competitive element is essentially already implemented and free by people who are already completely competent in load balancing. unless companies seek to reduce risk by bolting on a support contract...why F5 at all?

can someone from the biz side of the HN house chime in perhaps?

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F5 was very much a hardware company in a world of software vendors. The high and low end of the hardware market has shrunk rapidly as cloud has taken over. At high end, cloud providers like Amazon, Facebook and Google are building their own hardware[0] and at the other end, companies are increasingly just using those cloud providers.

For any large company, the easiest way to enter a new market is to just buy some of the competition. Of Nginx's competitors, most are either not "enterprise-y" enough (Caddy) or are already part of the CNCF (Traefik, Envoy). Really, I think the only other option could have been HaProxy.

[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-web-services-secret-wea...

Well, if may offer a view.. your are correct in your second paragraph the aspect that most people miss is that F5 is not only an enterprise product but primary systems (energy/gas/etc) and Telco (3/4/5G). The acquisition of NGINX is to complement that footprint. Just a different view.. be well yeah..

I will say that as someone who managed a leased hosting environment years ago, we dropped our expensive F5 device once it became clear we could do the same load balancing in Nginx for the cost of a virtual server. Even with a small support contract from Nginx it was way cheaper.

I mostly see it in businesses that aren't very competent and/or have a support/licensing partner that presents them a tunnel vision they cannot deviate from. F5 specifically is usually also just 'what they always had', or part of a bundle.

They had no integration plan, so I assumed they bought it to get some street cred for the push to become a modern devops software company (instead of hardwar) and also to kill nginx as they were beginning to win sales. I used to work at nginx and F5.

iRule are the things that makes the F5 appliance special, it enables you to run TCL on a variety of events (ex: HTTP_REQUEST, CLIENT_CONNECTED...). Some typical uses are requests and responses modification, logging, bug fixes on closed source web applications... I also the F5 device support various permissions levels to enable delegation/separation of administrative privileges.

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