NGINX, Inc. started more than 10 years ago as open-source project. The company’s misson was “trying to solve the simple problem of putting 10k web connections on 2002 hardware,” Sarah Novotny, technical evangelist for NGINX, informed theCUBE‘s Stu Miniman during an interview at Red Hat Summit 2015.

In the last 10 years, NGINX “has grown to encompass static asset delivery, reverse proxy, load balancing, cashing, SSL termination, basically all that edge-of-network application acceleration that exists that a developer wants control of that used to live in the network,” Novotny explained.

Novotny discussed changes she has observed during her career. The industry veteran stated, “2010 is when I really saw a flip from [open source] being suspect in the enterprise to it being a default.” She also added that they’re trying to embrace the big player within open-source communities. “It’s the developers who are the kingmakers,” she said. “Having something available as a download to play with it and have it proved out in meritocracy is the way that you get software adopted these days.”

A shift from ‘servers as pets’

With Docker, Novotny has seen a shift from “servers as pets” to more like “cattle,” meaning that the industry is displaying a “logical evolution from ‘I know everything about this as a systems administrator’ to … infrastructure as code, to … this Docker file builds it, and if it doesn’t work I kill it.”

Novotny stated she has recently seen that “the ability to respond to their user experience” creates “a new alignment of interests,” namely stability and features sets, as opposed to 10 years ago. At that time, Novotny saw operations concerned with stability and developers working on giving new features.

“Those [interests] are in opposition,” Novotny said, and that system placed “developers and operations in contention. As we’ve seen businesses evolve and learn and know that what differentiates them is the feature set in their software, is the ability to change the user experience, to respond to their user experience” leads to a better product and customer experience.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE