The first half of 2019 has seen significant enhancements to the NGINX Application Platform and related products: the NGINX Controller Load Balancing and API Management modules, NGINX Plus, NGINX Unit, and the NGINX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes. Catch up on what you might have missed!

In this installment of our "Ask NGINX" series, we explain how to install NGINX Plus offline on RHEL/CentOS systems, list currently supported Ubuntu releases, and answer questions about the future of NGINX open source projects now that we're part of F5.

With the NGINX OpenTracing dynamic module, you get distributed tracing data for every application proxied by NGINX or NGINX Plus without having to instrument the applications individually. We provide instructions for configuring NGINX Plus and two sample tracers, Jaeger and Zipkin.

The regular expression (regex) tester for NGINX and NGINX Plus takes the guesswork out of regexes, telling you whether a regex for a location or map block matches values as you intend. It builds the relevant configuration for you and shows the values for capture groups.

In this second part of our series on service mesh, we review recent innovations to several solutions (Consul, Google Anthos, Linkerd, Istio, NGINX Controller, and Tetrate) that improve availability by minimizing the risk of the control plane as a single point of failure.

In this installment of our "Ask NGINX" series, we discuss UDP health checks, having NGINX Plus verify JWTs generated with Microsoft Active Directory, performing client certificate-based authentication for IIS servers, and obtaining metrics for website visits or page views.

NGINX announces the latest branches of NGINX Open Source, the stable 1.16 branch and the mainline 1.17 branch. New to the stable branch are improvements to UDP proxying, the Random load‑balancing method, support for TLS 1.3 early data, dynamic loading of SSL certificates, and more.

Release 1.5.0 of the NGINX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes introduces a new configuration schema, extended Prometheus-based metrics, simplifications to TLS configuration, support for load balancing traffic to ExternalName services, and a new repository for Helm charts.

NGINX and NGINX Plus can act as an OAuth 2.0 Relying Party, sending access tokens to the Idenity Provider for validation and only proxying requests that pass the validation process.

NGINX is expanding its offerings for the public cloud. Enhancements include support for Amazon EC2 A1 Instances, CentOS 8, and RHEL 8; the NGINX Plus Enterprise Edition; a developer marketplace in partnership with DigitalOcean; and new NGINX Plus Certified Modules.