Release 4 of Nginx Plus, the commercial version of the exceptionally popular open source web accelerator, is now available. The company says the new release responds to industry needs to accelerate distributed apps as they connect securely to external services. Release 4 also eases deployment of application components across clouds and on-premises locations.

Nginx is an open-source reverse proxy server, as well as a load balancer, HTTP cache, and a web server. The project started with a strong focus on high concurrency, high performance, and low memory usage.

According to W3Techs data, San Francisco-based Nginx, Inc., is the web-delivery tier of choice for the top 10,000 websites (Nginx has held the lead since last month, and led the top 1,000 busiest websites for more than a year).

The company claims to serve 146 million websites.

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Gus RobertsonNginx CEO Gus Robertson, pictured, told VB exclusively, “With Nginx Plus release 4 we focused on extending beyond front-end application delivery to full end-to-end application traffic management. We concentrated on security, performance and monitoring of the services that enable distributed application architectures.”

Nginx Plus r4 is pushed for increasingly sophisticated  application architectures. “Security and user experience are top concerns for enterprises today,” said Robertson. “Simultaneously, developers are building bigger applications and scaling across more locations, creating greater traffic management challenges. Nginx Plus r4 simplifies the complexity while ensuring a seamless user experience, from developer to production.”

Robertson listed the following as key capabilities and benefits of Nginx Plus r4:

  • Enhanced security for distributed applications
  • Improved load balancing and caching
  • Intelligent logging and detailed status monitoring

Through a commitment to the open source community, Nginx’s share among the top one million sites has grown 39 percent year-over-year. In the big-league server world, where LAMP solutions dominate (Linux/Apache/MySql/PHP-Perl-Python), Nginx use impacts the Apache tier. Robertson told us, “We can substitute for the A in the LAMP stack. Most people call this LEMP (e = “engine x,” which is how your pronounce Nginx) 

Nginx, Inc., formed in 2011, grew out of the  Nginx open source project started in 2002. Funding began with a $3 million Series A round, followed by $10 million in a fully subscribed Series B round in October 2013. The company headcount is approaching 30.

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