F5 announced new developments that focus on its support for customers managing the accelerating pace of digital transformation and the critical role of open-source technology during the NGINX Spring 2.0 virtual conference. The company will release new open-source versions of management solutions and new open-source modern application reference architecture to allow developers to deliver their applications faster.
Three commitments
According to the announcement, F5 will also take an active role in the Kubernetes Ingress project and will join the Gateway API community. The company also unveiled Now Arriving, an interactive community experience featuring seven different immersive digital environments. The commitments focus on three key areas:
- More open-source offerings and community contributions. F5 plans to work with the community on GitHub, building new open source projects in a transparent way with issue tracking, release notes, and documentation to accelerate innovation.
- More innovation across the data, management, and control planes. Historically NGINX has focused its open-source efforts on the data plane. F5 will now offer free and open source NGINX control plane technologies, as well as a new management plane and abstracted workflow capabilities.
- Commercial versions of all open source NGINX products. To support applications at scale, commercial versions of NGINX will be available with additional security, governance, observability, and management capabilities. F5 will clearly define what goes into open source and what goes into its commercial offerings so customers can choose what’s right for them.

Rob Whiteley, vice president and general manager of the NGINX Product Group at F5 said,
“Over the past year we’ve provided capabilities customers rely on to deliver the next generation of compelling digital experiences, from the code the developers build to the customers who consume those experiences. We are ramping up the pace of innovation and commitment to customers and the open-source community to help them more effectively scale and manage modern application architectures.
We are supporting the Ingress project to ensure it continues to thrive. We aim to be the number one contributor to this project because we want to make sure that users can be assured that future versions of Kubernetes can continue to rely on NGINX.”