NGINX has announced the general availability of NGINX Plus R18, the only
all-in-one load balancer, content cache, web server, proxy, API gateway and Kubernetes
Ingress Controller.
NGINX’s flexibility, portability and seamless integration with CI/CD automation tools help
accelerate enterprise adoption of DevOps. NGINX Plus R18 advances this objective by
simplifying configuration workflows and enhancing the security and reliability of applications.

New capabilities introduced in R18 include:
● Simplifying configuration workflows :
Dynamic certificate loading: NGINX Plus introduces lazy loading of TLS
certificates. With lazy loading, TLS certificates are only loaded into memory
when a request is made for a matching hostname. This simplifies the NGINX
Plus configuration and reduces its size as multiple certificates can be handled
within a single server block. Furthermore, you can save time and effort by
automating the upload of certificates and private keys into the key-value store
using the NGINX Plus API. This is especially ideal for deployments with large
numbers of certificates or when there are a high frequency of configuration
reloads.
○ Support for port ranges for server configurations: With this release, users can
specify port ranges rather than just specific ports. Port ranges can be specified
for both HTTP and TCP/UDP applications (Stream module). This also allows
NGINX Plus to act as a proxy for an FTP server in passive mode.
○ Simplified cluster management: NGINX Plus R15 introduced synchronization of
runtime state across a cluster of NGINX Plus instances. This release enhances
clustering by enabling a single configuration to be used for each member of the
cluster. This is particularly suitable for dynamic environments such as
auto-scaling groups or containerized clusters.
○ Modular code organization with the NGINX JavaScript module: The NGINX
JavaScript module now supports the JavaScript import and export modules,
enabling you to organize your JavaScript code into multiple function-specific files
instead of a single file as before. This greatly improves readability and simplifies
maintenance, particularly if multiple teams are contributing JavaScript code.
● Enhanced Security:
○ Minimizing exposure of certificates: When managing TLS/SSL certificates for
secure sites and applications, users configure NGINX Plus to specify the
certificate and associated private key as files on disk. With this release, NGINX
Plus loads certificates directly from the key-value store where they reside in
memory. Keeping secrets off the filesystem makes it difficult for an attacker to
obtain the private key for a server certificate.
○ Support for opaque session tokens : NGINX Plus supports OpenID Connect
authentication and single sign-on for backend applications. With this release,
NGINX Plus supports opaque session tokens issued by OpenID Connect.
Opaque tokens contain no personally identifiable information about the user so
that no sensitive information is stored at the client.
● Improved Reliability:
○ Enabling clients to reconnect upon failed health checks : NGINX Plus active
health checks continually probes the health of upstream servers to ensure
traffic does not get forwarded to servers that are offline. With this release,
existing client connections can be terminated when an active health check
fails. This enables client applications to reconnect, at which point they are
proxied to a healthy backend server, thereby improving the reliability of your
applications.
For an in-depth look at these features and to learn more about additional features in R18,
please read our blog. To start your free trial of NGINX Plus R18 along with NGINX Controller,
visit https://www.nginx.com/free-trial-request-nginx-controller .