Announcing F5 NGINX Gateway Fabric 1.5.0 with NGINX Code Snippets

Today we are announcing the release of F5 NGINX Gateway Fabric 1.5.0 which comes with one of the most prominent features from F5 NGINX Ingress Controller: code snippets. As always, we have made this feature available through an extension of the Gateway API, a new resource called a SnippetFilter. With it, you can define custom NGINX configuration that can be applied to any Route rule!

In addition to SnippetFilters, some other highlights of this release include: 

• Ability to retain client IP information via Proxy Pass or XForwardedFor header 

• Configurable NGINX error log level and reduced “info” log verbosity 

• A new Getting Started guide for installing NGF for the first time 

• F5 NGINX Plus R33 support 

• Bug fixes! 
  

You can see the full changelog with details here! 

NGINX Code Snippets via SnippetFilters 

With a 20 year old legacy, there is a massive range of features that F5 NGINX provides that are not yet explicitly exposed through NGINX Gateway Fabric via the Gateway API. If you are familiar with NGINX directives and configuration and just want to use a native NGINX feature, you were unable to because our control plane would overwrite any configuration you wrote. We needed a way for your directives to merge with the configuration we pushed.

With SnippetFilters, we have not only enabled you to append directives to whatever context you need them in but also built them as an extension to the Gateway API. Once you define a SnippetFilter, any route rule can then use that snippet filter to apply NGINX configuration for the context you supplied. You can even change higher level contexts using these snippets, such as main, to do things like importing modules – just make sure you coordinate with everyone when making these changes!

As SnippetFilters do open the opportunity for misconfiguration in a way that may impact other application teams using the same Gateway, they do have to be explicitly enabled. But if you find yourself needing a feature from NGINX that is not yet available in NGINX Gateway Fabric, or you want to include your own NGINX logic, the SnippetFilter will fill that gap between our current first-class Gateway API features and the full power of NGINX. 

What’s Next 

Next release we will be focusing on a big architectural shift in NGINX Gateway Fabric that we have been planning for a while: separating our data and control planes. 

Currently, both our control plane (what configures NGINX for us) and our data plane (NGINX itself) are contained within the same pod. Ideally, these should be separate for security, performance, and scalability reasons. As we are also looking at supporting multiple Gateway resources for a single NGINX Gateway Fabric installation, we thought this was a good time to make that change, prompting our next release to be 2.0!

In 2.0, you’ll see the control plane start as its own pod. As you create Gateways, or as you scale existing ones, the control plane will spin up new instances of NGINX in their own pods. This translates into less overhead, better RBAC security, and the ability to provision multiple Gateway resources. 

For more information, check out our design on the separation! 

Resources 

For the complete changelog for NGINX Gateway Fabric 1.5.0, see the Release Notes. To try NGINX Gateway Fabric for Kubernetes with NGINX Plus, start your free 30-day trial today or contact us to discuss your use cases. 

If you would like to get involved, see what is coming next, or see the source code for NGINX Gateway Fabric, check out our repository on GitHub! 

We have weekly community meetings on Tuesdays at 9:30AM Pacific/12:30PM Eastern/5:30PM GMT. The meeting link, updates, agenda, and notes are on the NGINX Gateway Fabric Meeting Calendar. Links are also always available from our GitHub README.