We look back over the most influential blog posts of 2018 on nginx.com, to remind you of what we’ve worked hard on improving to make your experience of NGINX even better. The year witnessed announcements and updates for many products in the NGINX Application Platform.

When debugging traffic problems between NGINX and upstream servers, CDN77 couldn't get the data they needed except in the error log with debugging enabled, which slows performance and creates huge files. The team wrote a new custom module to log just the data they need.

NGINX Plus R17 introduces support for two-stage rate limiting and TLS 1.3, the latest version of the Transport Layer Security protocol. Configuration of OpenID Connect is simpler and NGINX WAF is 2x faster than before. The NGINX JavaScript module has also been updated.

Did you know there is more than one Ingress controller for Kubernetes that uses NGINX? You do now. We help you figure out which one makes sense for you, based on their differences around authorship, development philosophy, production readiness, security, and support.

What is API management? It covers all the functions you perform on your APIs across their life cycle, including definition and publishing, securing and managing traffic, monitoring and troubleshooting to ensure customer satisfaction, and analyzing traffic to maximize business value.

F5 BIG-IP hardware was no longer performing well for digital advertising platform AppNexus. The company switched to NGINX Plus for load balancing and saved 95%. At NGINX Conf 2018, Ernesto Chaves of AppNexus explains how and why his team chose NGINX Plus.

With NGINX Unit, configuring a new application in an existing production environment does not disrupt existing apps or require configuration reloads. Here are all the relevant commands and configuration from Amanda Bockoven's demo at NGINX Conf 2018.

This blog, based on a real customer use case, explains how to use the NGINX JavaScript module to apply a "virtual patch" for a problem in a backend application that can't be modified. In this case, the app couldn't process HTTP requests with lowercase method names.

Release 1.4.0 of the NGINX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes includes support for TCP and UDP load balancing and a "power of two choices" load-balancing algorithm (Random with Two Choices), extended Prometheus support, and easy development of custom Annotations.

The Random with Two Choices load-balancing algorithm is NGINX's implementation of the "power of two choices" method. This biased random algorithm has been shown to be effective at balancing loads when each load balancer has an incomplete or delayed view of the traffic.