EDIT: https://github.com/nginx/unit/blob/master/README.md is the better reading.
> NGINX Unit is a new, lightweight, open source application server built to meet the demands of today’s dynamic and distributed applications.
That means everything and nothing. They wasted their intro sentence on it. They probably don't have a very good idea of what it is either.
I guess it lost momentum when ZeroMQ did. Anyone know why? Sounds like a dream solution in the current microservice hype.
Also, websockets actually map pretty badly to http, conceptually, and fit zeromq much better IMO.
It never had much momentum though -- but what it lost and killed it was Zed's interest.
ZeroMQ still works great and the open source community is still maintaining it on GitHub [3]. I just think people are also looking at other technologies. A lot of interest popped up in things like Apache Kafka and Samsa. I still think ZeroMQ holds a unique place due to its lightweight and simple nature.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11547212
Before that, I used to hear people talking about it all the time.
Ended up using a Linux container on Docker to get the thing working.
It's still intended to run behind Nginx web server (or some other web server), much like you'd run something like PHP-FPM behind a web server.
Some things to look for, such as registration/discovery of services, intra-cluster load balancing (where it started, no doubt), identity propagation & authn/z
The biggest issue to my mind though is distributed transactions and logging/debug/development. My biggest stumbling blocks with this sort of thing.. stepping through code over microservices is such a PITA.
why do people always use "not recommended" when they actually mean "do not ever do this or you'll end up the laughing stock in the tech press"
Exposing this otherwise awesome API to the public will amount to a free RCE for everybody. So not ever expose this to the public, not even behind some authentication.
It's very cool that by design it's only listening on a domain socket. Don't add a proxy in front of this.
For the same reason they say, "non-trivial" when they really mean "nearly impossibly difficult". :)
This is not'nginx'. You can't sit and write this off because Apache did something similar ten years ago. The build in API alone is worth exploring.
Their eventing/threaded mpm is basically nginx.
And now nignx is starting to gain the features of apache.
Here you can see the configuration of workers and user/group permissions for a Go application:
http://unit.nginx.org/docs-configuration.html#go-application
Is it like the apache mod_php for php for example ?
Thanks in advance for your answer
I don't use Go, but D (dlang), vibe.d, varnish and lighttpd are working real well for my latest venture.
Nginx is extremely fast for that case, which is typically the reason most people proxy languages through it. ;-)
It could be that nginx is more efficient at static file serving, but that'd be down to being specifically designed and optimised for it rather than some "sync vs async" thing.
Your choice is force a timeout and kill streaming requests, but defend against slow client DOS, or support streaming requests and suffer from a trivial slow client DOS.
For this and other reasons I still recommend fronting golang with something more capable on this front.
A properly edited book would be awesome. I would pay for it of course.
uWSGI definitely needs more concise tutorials on how to accomplish some tasks (e.g. creating Hello World with python and uWSGI, or how the uWSGI emperor works).
However I disagree with "lacking severely in the department of documentation"
Sure, it's not as easy as some other projects to dive into (e.g. Django) but IMHO the documentation is not lacking, it's just not forthcoming.
If you sit down and read through the uWSGI documentation, you'll discover a lot of very useful functionality and a reasonable description of how to utilise it.
What's lacking is the tl;dr way to bash something out quick and dirty.
Yelp.com runs behind uwsgi, and effectively all of the python services behind it do as well. Some use more uncommon features like gevent support.
Agreed. After recently testing out Python for a web dev project I was really dismayed at the fragmentation and lack of usability in the landscape of application servers. Here's hoping this might lead to some standardization.
Is it supposed to replace language specific servers, like unicorn and puma for rails (but then, I'm confused about what such kind of support would be for Go, since the server is directly embedded in the program)? Does it embeds interpreter for interpreted languages, like mod_* did for apache?
Note that it's actually CGo (which is not Go), and it uses a non-standard build process to install it: http://unit.nginx.org/docs-installation.html#source-code.
I don't like it at all :( I usually put plain nginx in front of my app, to handle static files and simple load-balancing, but this seems to be oriented towards handling issues best handled elsewhere.
It works with postgres or cassandra (and eventually scylladb https://github.com/Mashape/kong/issues/754 ).
Also, nginx is pretty good at restarts, even with thousands of files and vhosts.
in fact nothing like it really AFAICT
I think a "how it works" or "design doc" would be really helpful.
That said, the source files do make for pleasant reading. The nginx team has always set a strong example for what good C programming looks like.
EDIT: Their blog post [0] makes this more clear... nginx unit is one of four parts in their new "nginx application platform" [1]
[0] https://www.nginx.com/blog/introducing-nginx-application-pla...
Not having to use docker would be a huge plus for me.
The homepage on Nginx.com is basically
> Join this webinar to learn
> - What NGINX Unit does that has not been available before
There are a couple of options I'd like to see added to the Python configuration though before I could try it:
- Ability to point it at a virtualenv.
- Ability to set environment variables for the application.
How is this specific to Nginx? This same mistake is possible with any other software ever written.
I can't speak for the other languages (PHP, Go, Python) but I have some reservations about it helping Java (as well as Erlang and other (J)VM languages) as FastCGI like stuff has been attempted for Java in the past with not very good success with the exception of Resin.
I guess it would be interesting though if they did a native Servlet 3.0+ implementation like Resin but I doubt that is is what will happen. Regardless Netty, Undertow and even Jetty have caught up speed wise to Resin (well at least according to techempower).
AJP/mod_jk for Java.
[Here's](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-serv...) an old guide for running Flask with uWSGI and nginx on Ubuntu. There are several more recent, detailed instructions online.
Personally, I have an AWS instance running a Node.JS server on (blocked) port 8000, a Django uWSGI app on 8001, and a static resume site, all being reverse-proxy served by nginx. So I don't really see the advantages of Nginx Unit yet.
If you are only looking to deploy your python code (and nginx/apache is constantly running on the server), then follow these steps
1. install docker on server 2. create an account on https://hub.docker.com/ 3. https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/stack-deploy/#deploy-th...
your docker workflow in the future looks like this: 1. test the application on your laptop inside a docker container 2. push container to docker hub 3. "docker update" your stack
BTW, it is a good idea to always do API versioning on production runs. That will eliminate the possibility that different API versions (files stuck in the cache, or simply people who kept browser open for a long time) use the same endpoint
> Full support for Go, PHP, and Python; Java and Node.JS support coming soon
It's open source at the moment at least and I think it's reasonable to expect at least that the parts that are open source today will remain so in the future. Certainly they could have a commercial version with extra features like they do with Nginx, but as long as they have a useful version of this Nginx Unit available open source I will be happy to use it.
Kong is just an API gateway: you run your own infrastructure as usually and put a gateway on top of it.
Not directly related as Unit seems to be advertised as app server primarily, but you can see quoted text on main page.
The rest of the headline cleared it up of course, but I was curious for a minute how that would look.
EDIT: When discussing a new product, I would think the name is a fair point of discussion.
Furthermore after this thread's title changed, it now requires a clickthrough to dispel similar misunderstandings.
The REST API part of it is for updating its configuration over HTTP.
I hope they would avoid the Second System syndrome..
It's not about making something impossible possible. It's about improving possible things in some dimension - like speed, safety, flexibility, or - in this case - standardization and integration with already used tool.
For one, it's not just "handling a use-case" it's also _how_ you handle it. And within what ecosystem you handle it. And what kind of support etc you offer with it. Etc...
Amazing progress! Someone introduce them to CGI.
It looks like it's more of a replacement to good old NGINX+Apache set up where there would be mod_php, mod_cgi, mod_perl and .htaccess on backend to serve the app.
I came to the comments specifically to try to figure out what the heck this thing does.
The page itself never gets to the point of "Here's what it does".
No
> you could put in your own cloud?
Yes
If Nginx Unit could host flask applications, it would be great news.
Does it do WSGI then? Did they write the equivalent of mod_wsgi?
