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This year’s edition of F5’s annual customer event, Agility 2022, is taking place February 15 and 16, and NGINX is excited to be part of the lineup! Join other developers and architects, as well as security and networking professionals, to gain insight from industry leaders and digital infrastructure experts, including the NGINX community.

F5 has filled this year’s agenda with many ways to learn and connect to the NGINX/F5 community, including insightful keynotes, new topics for educational sessions, interactive product simulators, live discussion forums, and much more. The event kicks off with a keynote featuring Rob Whiteley, General Manager of the NGINX Product Group at F5, and Kara Sprague, Executive Vice President and General Manager, App Delivery and Enterprise Product Ops (for a preview, see our blog). Then our product experts dive into all the details in the discussion forums, breakout sessions, and 10‑minute “quick hit” videos.

Read on for a summary of sessions sure to be of interest to NGINX users, divided into two thematic tracks: Enable Modern App Delivery at Scale and Secure Digital Experiences. Within the tracks, sessions are ordered by start time so you can plan your personal agenda. (If you also deploy F5 BIG-IP, be sure to check out the Simplify Delivery of Legacy Apps track too.)

Enable Modern App Delivery at Scale

Learn How to Talk Like You Understand Kubernetes

Live Discussion Forum: February 15, 11:00–11:45 a.m. PST
Brian Ehlert – Senior Product Manager, F5
Jenn Gile – Manager, Product Marketing, F5

With the invention of Kubernetes came a host of new concepts and tools, particularly around networking and traffic management. In particular, Ingress controllers and service meshes did not exist prior to the Kubernetes era. Nor were Layer 4 and Layer 7 protocols and traffic typically managed from the same control plane. In this discussion forum, Brian and Jenn provide a “translation guide” for these new concepts and tools so you can have meaningful discussions with your leaders and teams.

What Is a Modern App?

Live Discussion Forum: February 15, 12:00–12:45 p.m. PST
Damian Curry – Business Development Technical Director, F5
Brandon Gulla – CTO and VP, SUSE Rancher Government Solutions
Karthik Krishnaswamy – Director, Product Marketing, F5
Austin Parker – Head of DevRel, Lightstep

Application modernization is not just a buzzword anymore – it’s rapidly gaining mainstream adoption. According to our own The State of Application Strategy in 2021 report, more than three‑quarters of organizations are modernizing their applications, an increase of 133% over 2020. But what exactly is a modern app? Is it just one that’s been shifted to the cloud, or delivered using Kubernetes and service mesh? Or does it entail new thinking around culture and processes such that apps enable business objectives? Join Damian and Karthik for a discussion with Austin and Brandon about how their experiences have informed their definition of modern apps.

Is That Project Ready for You? Open Source Maturity Models

Breakout: February 15, 2:00–2:25 p.m. PST
Dave McAllister – Sr. OSS Technical Evangelist, F5

Open source projects are often driven by the need to scratch a software itch. But while they’re innovative, exciting, and available, how do you know that open source projects are up to the work you need them to perform? Maturity models are one tool that can help you calculate the risk‑reward ratio for a project along dimensions like stability, activity, and support. Dave explains which criteria are important, and discusses the maturity level of NGINX open source projects.

Why You Need a Management Plane for Delivering and Securing Your Apps and APIs

Breakout: February 15, 2:00–2:25 p.m. PST
Chris Witeck – Director, Product Management, F5

With the explosion of applications and APIs, you need a management solution that provides governance for your Platform Ops teams without introducing friction for your DevOps and API owners. What are the core tenets of a management plane? How do you achieve scale and ensure security and reliability for your apps and APIs without slowing down your developers? Join Chris to learn more about how F5 NGINX solutions address these questions and more.

Are You Ready for a Service Mesh?

Breakout: February 15, 4:00–4:25 p.m. PST
Jenn Gile – Manager, Product Marketing, F5
Kate Osborn – Software Engineer, F5

Service mesh is the hot technology featured at just about every cloud‑native conference. But do you actually need one, and if so is your organization ready to implement it? Jenn and Kate share a six‑question checklist that will help you determine readiness and whether your organization will get value from adopting a mesh.

Modern Application Reference Architectures

Breakout: February 15, 4:00–4:25 p.m. PST
Jason Schmidt – Solutions Architect, F5
Elijah Zupancic – Solutions Architect, F5

There are many reference architectures out in the world, but how many can actually be deployed? The F5 NGINX Modern Application Reference Architecture (MARA) project is designed to be both production‑grade and easy to deploy. Join Elijah and Jason for an update on this project and a preview of what’s coming in the future.

Authorization and Authentication for Kubernetes Apps

Breakout: February 16, 12:00–12:25 p.m. PST
Amir Rawdat – Technical Marketing Manager

Authorization and authentication are non‑functional requirements that often get built into apps and services. On a small scale, the amount of complexity added by this practice is manageable if the app isn’t updated frequently. But with faster release velocities at larger scale, integrating authentication and authorization into your apps becomes untenable. In this session, Amir shares how offloading authorization and authentication to an Ingress controller can improve security and use resources more efficiently.

Modern Application Ecosystems

Live Discussion Forum: February 16, 12:00–12:45 p.m. PST
Damian Curry – Business Development Technical Director, F5

As you “shift left” into a more modern application architecture, you find yourself in the middle of a vast and complex ecosystem. When there are multiple solutions to every problem, how do you make the “right” choice? In this panel, Damian discusses some of the key considerations and real life examples of how these decisions are made and how to avoid having them backfire on you.

When Performance Matters: Choosing Between NGINX Ingress Controllers

Breakout: February 16, 2:00–2:25 p.m. PST
Amir Rawdat – Technical Marketing Manager

There are two popular open source Kubernetes Ingress controllers that use NGINX and a commercial version based on NGINX Plus that is developed and supported by F5 NGINX. These projects all started around the same time, have similar names on GitHub, and implement the same function. In this session, Amir explains how they differ and how to choose an Ingress controller that’s best for your needs.

Managing NGINX with NGINX Instance Manager

Quick Hit: On demand (10 minutes)
Robert Haynes  – Technical Marketing Manager, F5

Join Robert for a quick demo of NGINX Instance Manager. You’ll see how easy it can be to track, configure, and monitor all your NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus instances.

[Editor – NGINX Instance Manager is now Instance Manager, part of F5 NGINX Management Suite.]

What’s New with the NGINX Controller Application Delivery Module

Quick Hit: On demand (10 minutes)
Ken Araujo – Principal Product Manager, F5

Check out all the latest and greatest developments to the NGINX Controller Application Delivery Module. Ken showcases the new features and shows you why NGINX Controller is the ideal solution for holistic, simplified, app‑centric management of your NGINX app delivery and security services and the apps that they support.

[Editor – NGINX Controller is now F5 NGINX Management Suite.]

Secure Digital Experiences

Empower Your Organizations’ Digital Transformation with Easy Modern Application Security

Breakout: February 15, 3:00–3:25 p.m. PST
Yaniv Sazman – Manager, Product Management, F5
Daphne Won – Product Manager, F5

Today’s application landscape has changed dramatically. Modern apps are microservices that run in containers, communicate via APIs, and deploy via automated CI/CD pipelines. In this session, Daphne and Yaniv explore how DevOps teams can integrate controls that have been authorized by the security team across distributed environments without slowing release velocity or app performance.

Shifting Left with F5 NGINX

Live Discussion Forum: February 16, 8:00–8:45 a.m. PST
Thelen Blum – Sr. Product Marketing Manager for NGINX App Protect, F5
Fabrizio Fiorucci – Principal Solutions Engineer, F5
Jason McMinn – Infrastructure Architect & Sr. DevOps Engineer, Modern Hire

Gone are the days when security could simply be bolted on at the end of the development process. In today’s world, integrated security must become a normal part of AppDev and DevOps implementations. Instead of a painful extra step that must be dealt with, modern application security can be a robust support system that empowers organizations to reach their business goals and guides them to even greater heights. Join Fabrizio and Thelen in this conversation with Jason about how Modern Hire is securing its modern applications with NGINX App Protect on its journey to a completely cloud‑based environment.

360-Degree Web App and API Protection for Open Banking

Quick Hit: On demand (10 minutes)
Valentin Tobi – Strategic Security Architect, F5

Valentin shows how to utilize F5’s NGINX and Shape technologies to protect an open banking deployment in partnership with the PingFederate solution as an identity provider. Learn how to use NGINX App Protect to secure an Open Banking API with integrated defense against bot attacks, deploy NGINX as an API microgateway, and manage both configurations through a CI/CD pipeline. Valentin also explains how to manage financial aggregators and protect against web scraping using Shape’s aggregator defense.

Deploy NGINX App Protect-Based WAF to AWS in Minutes

Quick Hit: On demand (10 minutes)
Mikhail Fedorov – Security Strategic Architect, F5

Discover a solution that deploys NGINX App Protect‑based WAF to the AWS cloud in minutes. This solution includes a complete set of components for successful WAF deployment: a fully automated data plane, a GitOps‑based control plane, and visibility dashboards. It can be used as a production‑grade WAF deployment or an environment to experience App Protect WAF.

NGINX App Protect DoS Demo

Quick Hit: On demand (10 minutes)
Daniel Edgar – Sr. Technical Product Manager, F5

Looking to quickly and easily integrate advanced application availability protection into your NGINX Plus data plane instances? Join Daniel for a demo of NGINX App Protect DoS that showcases the power of machine learning for securing your modern applications against sophisticated Layer 7 DoS attacks.

Register Today for Agility 2022

Don’t miss a minute of all the great insight and solutions on offer! Register for Agility today. Your confirmation email will include details on how to build your personalized agenda.

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Learn how to deploy, configure, manage, secure, and monitor your Kubernetes Ingress controller with NGINX to deliver apps and APIs on-premises and in the cloud.



About The Author

Tony Mauro

Tony Mauro

Sr. Content Marketing Manager

About F5 NGINX

F5, Inc. is the company behind NGINX, the popular open source project. We offer a suite of technologies for developing and delivering modern applications. Together with F5, our combined solution bridges the gap between NetOps and DevOps, with multi-cloud application services that span from code to customer.

Learn more at nginx.com or join the conversation by following @nginx on Twitter.