Advanced features with NGINX Plus

NGINX Gateway Fabric can use NGINX Open Source or NGINX Plus as its data plane. NGINX Plus is the closed source, commercial version of NGINX. Using NGINX Plus as the data plane offers additional benefits compared to the open source version.

Benefits of NGINX Plus

• Robust metrics: A plethora of additional Prometheus metrics are available.
• Live activity monitoring: The NGINX Plus dashboard shows real-time metrics and information about your server infrastructure.
• Dynamic upstream configuration: NGINX Plus can dynamically reconfigure upstream servers when applications in Kubernetes scale up and down, preventing the need for an NGINX reload.
• Session persistence: NGINX Plus provides support for cookie-based session persistence, allowing client requests to be consistently routed to the same upstream pod.
• Load balancing methods: NGINX Plus provides advanced, latency-aware load balancing methods (such as least_time and least_time last_byte inflight) that route traffic based on time to first byte or full response, optionally factoring in in-flight requests for smarter upstream selection.
• Support: With an NGINX Plus license, you can take advantage of full support from NGINX, Inc.