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The BusinessValue of ModernApplication Delivery01
The Business Value of Modern Application DeliveryWhy Application DeliveryMatters in Digital BusinessesIt used to be that success in business was about big vs. small. Traditional enterprises beattheir competition through market dominance, and larger companies usually won. In today'sdigital world, competition is about fast vs. slow. Enterprises win by bringing new capabilitiesto market faster.Modern enterprises have evolved into software companies. Even if your business doesn’t sellsoftware, the application and computing infrastructure at the core of your business is nowyour most important product line. Competitors who can innovate faster within their softwareinfrastructure will gain tremendous advantages and cost savings in the marketplace, whileslower moving enterprises get run over in the online stampede. This dynamic defines thedigital business era.That’s why empowering your IT and development teams with a modern application deliveryplatform is essential. It enables them to deliver new apps more easily, monitor them in production,and maintain and improve them over time, ensuring a sustainable competitive edge.How long does it take your development team to deliver a new application feature, test it,and push it out to production for your users? Ten years ago, you could have been forgiven forsaying “six months”. Five years ago, “three months” was still an acceptable answer. Today,and in the future, the answer will be weeks or days. For the most agile firms – pun intended –timeframes of hours are the new standard.To achieve this kind of velocity, enterprises have had to make the transition from monolithic,legacy desktop and client-server applications to lighter, loosely coupled RESTful, API-basedservices. Reuse of code, services, and infrastructure allows systems designers to focus on thebusiness logic instead of the plumbing below. Cloud infrastructure means these developerscan also acquire resources on demand to test their code.With this transition comes the need to provide customers and internal users with 24/7access to corporate applications and services. Orders from distributors worldwide have tobe processed, reliably and within a timeframe set out in a service level agreement (SLA).A problematic code change in, for instance, an ordering system can take it offline for hours,which is unacceptable today. So teams have to be absolutely sure their software changesare secure, reliable, and won’t break anything.1
The Business Value of Modern Application DeliveryMoreover, enterprise application infrastructure has always needed to be highly flexible to fitchanging needs. The rise of public clouds highlights what’s possible: systems come online,run their jobs, and are shut down in a matter of seconds. Tracking all of the individual containersand systems, while also plugging them into existing security and networking structures,is impossible to perform by hand.In order to deliver innovative software faster, and serve it reliably and securely, your softwaredevelopers and system administrators need a platform that has a foot in both the old world ofenterprise needs and the new world of cloud computing. Infrastructure must be customizable –and, most importantly, it must be deployable at the same rate as software. In essence,your application delivery infrastructure must be an easily modified, automatically managed,software-based platform that can grow and scale on demand.A proper application delivery platform enables your software teams to focus on your businessapplications, which constitute your company's sustainable competitive edge. Every updateyou deliver to your applications gives you another advantage in the marketplace. Whetheryou’re giving your downstream distributors an easier way to place orders, or providingcustomers with an easier path to services and support, software is what makes it possible.Empowering your teams with a modern application delivery platform enables them to moreeasily deliver new software, monitor it in production, and maintain it over time.10 Ways Application DeliveryDrives Better Business OutcomesAn application delivery platform handles the rapid architectural change within your infrastructurewhile abstracting that change away from the applications themselves. As a result, your softwareteams increase developer autonomy and rev up velocity, empowering your entire organizationto deliver innovation on a daily basis. Removing complexity from the stack by consolidatingon a cohesive application delivery platform also increases agility. Your developers have fewermoving parts to worry about, and less code to maintain, because functions are decoupled.2
The Business Value of Modern Application DeliveryAdditionally, the principles of DevOps dictate that software development velocity increases asmetrics are poured back into the system, creating a feedback loop. With a platform for rapidapplication delivery and real-time application management in place, your teams can funnelsuch metrics back into their processes, allowing for application optimization, performancemeasurement over time, and better reporting for managers.Organizations of all sizes and digital maturity are turning to modern software-based applicationdelivery infrastructure to deliver business agility. By doing so, they:1. Reduce costs. Reduce capex, and eliminate the associated opex complexity, by collapsingmultiple app delivery components into a single, multi-use platform.2. Improve customer experience. Improve application performance and deliver bettercustomer experiences through full-system metrics and analytics.3. Avoid lock-in. Run infrastructure across any private or public cloud, enabling you to moveapps and services across cloud boundaries.4. Increase flexibility. Support multiple legacy systems alongside modern apps to quicklyaccommodate changing business requirements.5. Operate simply. Automate operations with an easy-to-use platform that enables selfservice, increases developer productivity, and aligns with line-of-business usage.6. Drive openness. Leverage enterprise-ready cloud services built on open source software,as used by the largest, most successful digital companies.7. Deliver reliability. Increase resiliency and provide a secure foundation for mission-critical,customer-facing apps.8. Scale massively. Scale from tens to hundreds of millions of users on a single platform,ensuring costs don’t increase in lock step with business growth.9. Rely on proven technology. Trust time-tested technology that already runs the largest,most successful digital businesses in the world.10. Automate service delivery. Program and automate with APIs that integrate yourinfrastructure and your continuous delivery capabilities.3
The Business Value of Modern Application DeliveryHow NGINX is ChangingApplication DeliveryThe modern application platform is the web, even when results aren't being rendered in abrowser. RESTful services are the backbone of digital architectures and utilize the sameservers and infrastructure that host web applications. NGINX is designed for this RESTful,digital world.Enterprises developing modern apps or transforming their IT infrastructure choose NGINXbecause it offers unparalleled flexibility and scalability in a space where traditional tools, suchas F5 load balancers and Apache web servers, have remained largely the same for more than20 years. These tools are either hardware-centric or singularly focused, whereas softwareofferings from NGINX have expanded into a full application development and delivery suite.NGINX performs as a reverse proxy, load balancer, web application firewall (WAF), API gateway,Kubernetes Ingress controller, service router, content delivery network, and application server.Put simply, NGINX enables enterprises to reduce stack complexity while managing a softwaredefined infrastructure through a single control plane.NGINX Builds on its History as the Most Trusted Platform for WebsitesNGINX is the trusted platform that runs the world’s largest, most successful digital properties.As of December 2017, NGINX helped deliver: 62% of the top 10,000 busiest websites in the world. 55% of the top 100,000 busiest websites in the world. 44% of the top 1 million busiest websites in the world. 37% of all active websites, according to a survey by W3Techs.4
The Business Value of Modern Application DeliveryUsage of Web Servers (Percentages) Broken Down by Ranking706055.2504036.543.962.5OverallTop 1,000,000Top 100,000Top 10,000Top 4 11.4 11.47.84.9Microsoft-IISSource: Netcraft January 2018 Web Server Survey. Sample size 1.7 billion websites.Why is NGINX used disproportionately on the largest websites, with the percentage increasingevery month? Because those sites need massive scalability. Behind the scenes, applicationdelivery infrastructure has become more than just a load balancer box on a systems diagram:it has become the central service for managing and monitoring applications at scale. NGINX hasbecome the standard load balancer for cloud usage, as it provides low-latency performance,enterprise-grade scalability, and open source flexibility.The Value of NGINX inthe Modern EnterpriseNGINX is one of the world’s most successful open source projects. Hundreds of millions of peoplerely on NGINX to run their mission-critical, customer-facing applications. NGINX, Inc. offers a suiteof products, professional services, and award-winning support that build on this foundation.More than 1,500 commercial customers rely on application development and delivery technologyfrom NGINX to drive business value and return on investment for digital initiatives.5
The Business Value of Modern Application DeliveryHere’s how fivecustomers rely onNGINX to achievebetter businessoutcomes:Bluestem Brands executes, with faster time to market.NGINX ensures companies complete a larger numberof projects, faster. NGINX products are lightweight,programmable, and designed for modern software.That’s why online retailer Bluestem Brands turned toNGINX to migrate from monolithic apps to microservices. NGINX helps Bluestem Brands reduce costsand, more importantly, increase developer productivity.Bluestem Brands ties together NGINX and their DevOpstoolset to bring services to market faster.BuzzFeed profitably scales its business.Applications are critical to business revenue.BuzzFeed knows this well, with more than 7 billionnews, entertainment, and video views every month.NGINX helps BuzzFeed profitably scale acrossits web and mobile platforms. NGINX is centralto the microservices modernization that enablesBuzzFeed to handle explosive growth. BuzzFeedsimply provisions more software capacity as itcontinues to add new services and grow itssubscriber base.Discovery Education drives cost and time savings.The NGINX platform is entirely software-based andruns on any commodity hardware, within virtualmachines, in the cloud, and in containers. NGINXhelped Discovery Education transform video deliverywhile cutting costs by 75% compared to traditionalhardware-based solutions. Now Discovery Educationfurther reduces costs by dynamically provisioningcapacity to handle traffic spikes, automating theinfrastructure with Puppet to slash the downtimeformerly associated with hardware additions.IgnitionOne enables a superior customer experience.NGINX is a lightweight infrastructure that improvesthe performance of your applications and digitalservices. That’s why IgnitionOne turned to NGINXto help process more than 500,000 requests persecond of real-time bidding on its digital advertisingplatform. With NGINX, IgnitionOne provides a superiorcustomer experience, handling 5 times as much trafficas it could with the previous hardware infrastructure,and for only 5% of the cost.Reliam delivers better, faster digital transformations.Bringing digital services online faster is a majorcompetitive advantage. But most organizations don’thave the expertise to go it alone. Some of the world’stop brands, such as the Grammy Awards, Miss Universe,Nissan, and the Oscars, turn to Reliam to implementonline digital experiences. Reliam, in turn, partnerswith NGINX to deliver the performance, scale, andmulti-cloud capabilities required by these customersfor digital transformation.6
The Business Value of Modern Application DeliveryThe NGINX Application PlatformNGINX delivers business value to its customers with the NGINX Application Platform, a suiteof products that together form the core of what organizations need to create applications withperformance, reliability, security, and scale. It builds on our core open source technologiesand includes three primary products: NGINX Plus, NGINX Controller, and NGINX Unit.NGINX ControllerCentralized monitoring and managementAnalyticsLoad BalancerControlPolicyContent CacheMonolithAPI GatewayWAFNGINX PlusNGINX UnitApplication deliveryCloudMicroservicesWeb and application serverContainerVirtual MachineInfrastructure – Multi-cloud versatility7Bare Metal
The Business Value of Modern Application DeliveryNGINX Open Source and NGINX PlusNGINX Plus builds atop the open source NGINX software, the free web server that started it all.This open source project is highly esteemed as a fast, reliable web server and reverse proxy.Each function acts independently, or blends them together for a full pipeline of reliable,highly scalable traffic management.NGINX Plus adds enhanced load balancing, caching, authentication, high availability, andprogramming features for application delivery at modern scale. NGINX Plus also includesaward-winning support and access to a professional services team, with everything you needto run NGINX in production environments, across both data centers and clouds. NGINX Plusis ideal for enterprises that need to cut costs while delivering at scale, and as they transitionfrom monolithic applications to microservices.NGINX ControllerNGINX Controller is a centralized monitoring and management platform for NGINX Plus.Controller easily manages multiple NGINX Plus instances, reveals performance insights inreal time, monitors security issues, reroutes traffic to avoid congestion, and ensures SLAsare met, all through a single control plane. Controller generates reports to uncover newbusiness needs and performs system-wide configuration management and optimizations.NGINX UnitNGINX Unit is a lightweight, open source application server built for today’s dynamic anddistributed applications. It supports multiple programming languages, and configurationchanges that never disrupt service. NGINX Unit serves your applications in a highly scalablecluster, ready for service mesh integration. With NGINX Unit, you can run legacy applications andnewer, innovative systems together on the same server, reducing costs and improving flexibility.NGINX Web Application FirewallThe NGINX Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects applications against sophisticated Layer 7attacks that might otherwise lead to system hijacking by attackers, loss of sensitive data,and downtime. The NGINX WAF is based on the widely used ModSecurity open source softwareand is a dynamic module that runs on NGINX Plus, further reducing the cost and complexityof your application delivery stack.8
The Business Value of Modern Application DeliveryNGINX Helps at Every Levelof the BusinessRegardless of your role, you’ll find NGINX delivers business value: For CEOs: Business is now about the fast outcompeting the slow. Every business is asoftware business, and digital service delivery is a requirement. NGINX is a key enabler thatensures you can capitalize on the top- and bottom-line benefits of digital transformation. For CIOs: NGINX is backed by powerful enterprise service and award-winning support.Based on proven technology that's been used for more than a decade by millions oforganizations, NGINX ensures your digital transformation initiatives are successful bydelivering software projects on time and at scale. For CTOs: NGINX provides a multi-cloud application delivery layer. NGINX enables theperformance, scalability, reliability, agility, and security needed to meet ever-changingbusiness needs. A large open source community ensures peer education, innovation,and customization. For DevOps leaders: NGINX offers a highly scalable platform for both modern microservicesand legacy apps. It reduces the cost and complexity of your application architecture,automates service delivery, and improves both IT operations and developer productivity.NGINX is a consolidated application delivery platform that offers a wide variety of capabilitiesacross traditional and modern enterprise architectures. NGINX consolidates half dozen ormore disparate components from your current stack, drastically simplifying your overallapplication architecture and providing a single platform for delivering mission-critical,customer-facing digital services.9
The Business Value of Modern Application Delivery 4 How NGINX is Changing Application Delivery The modern application platform is the web, even when results aren't being rendered in a browser. RESTful services are the backbone of digital architectures and utilize the same servers and infrastructure that host web applications.
