Angie is a fork created by former F5 developers
The release of the first version of the high-performance HTTP server and multi-protocol proxy server "Angie" was announced. This is a fork of Nginx created by a group of former project developers who left F5 Network.
For those new to NGINX, you should know that it enables digital transformation companies to modernize their existing monolithic applications and deliver new microservices-based applications.
It should be remembered that just over 2 years ago Nginx and F5 jointly announced the news about the definitive acquisition of Nginx by the F5 Network group, a leader in multi-cloud application services, for a total enterprise value of $670 million.
However, despite the explanations, doubts and questions remain within the open source community about this acquisition and the future of Nginx's open source solutions, to which we can already see a bit of the direction it is taking, Well, on the part of the detractors, they have made the decision to continue with a project on their part.
About Angie
The developers describe the project as follows:
Angie is an efficient, powerful, and scalable web server, which was forked from nginx by some of its former core developers, with the intention of extending the functionality far beyond the original version.
Angie is a drop-in replacement for nginx, so you can use your existing nginx configuration without breaking changes.
To support the development of the project and continue supporting Nginx users in Russia (it should be remembered that it was created by Igor Sysoev, a Russian software engineer, and that various blocks have been applied in Russia due to the current conflict with Ukraine), the company Web Server was created , which received an investment of $1 million.
Among the co-owners of the new company are Valentin Bartenev (leader of the team that developed the Nginx Unit product), Ivan Poluyanov (former head of front-end developers at Rambler and Mail.Ru), Oleg Mamontov (head of NGINX Inc.'s technical support team), and Ruslan Ermilov ( [email protected] ). Zaur Abasmirzoev, former CTO of lenta.ru, has been appointed director of the new company. Igor Sysoev, the founder of Nginx, is not involved in the project.
The release of Angie 1.0.0 forks from the nginx 1.23.2 codebase and includes the following changes:
- Added implementation of a HTTP RESTful interface to access basic web server information and statistics about client connections, shared memory zones, HTTP requests, HTTP response caching, DNS queries, TCP/UDP sessions created by the module stream and restricted zones implemented using the limit_conn and limit_req modules. Statistics are generated in JSON format. A new "api" directive is provided to enable the HTTP RESTful interface.
- The "status_zone" directive has been added to the "http" module, which defines the zone to collect statistics on requests processed in the context of the "server" and "location" directives.
- The "status_zone" directive has been added to the "stream" module, which defines the zone for collecting statistics on TCP and UDP sessions.
- The "status_zone" parameter has been added to the "resolve" directive, which defines the zone to accumulate statistics on the DNS queries sent.
- Added $angie_version variable with Angie server version.
Finally, it is mentioned that, regarding future plans , a significant expansion of the original functionality is envisioned while maintaining basic compatibility with the Nginx configuration and the ability to use Angie as an Nginx replacement without significantly changing the configuration.
Compared to the original Nginx, it is planned to qualitatively improve fault tolerance, increase performance, simplify maintenance, and add additional features for cluster systems.
For those interested in learning more , the source code for Angie is available under a BSD license and can be viewed at the following link.