The past few years have seen Groupon Inc., Buzzfeed and many other of the large website operators that rely on Nginx Inc.’s web server switch to its commercial edition. It’s the result of an aggressive monetization campaign that the company is stepping up today by launching a new release with a bevy of feature enhancements.

NGINX Plus 12 puts the emphasis on improving the reliability of large-scale deployments. To that end, the new version brings a “configuring sharing” tool designed streamline the implementation of operational changes. Instead of manually modifying each server in a deployment, administrators can now simply apply their desired changes to the so-called master instance that coordinates the cluster and have it distribute the update without risk of human error.

As part of the process, NGINX Plus 12 backs up each machine and checks if it’s compatible with the new configuration before performing the installation. The task of adding more servers to a deployment is handled similarly. According to the company, an improved health checking mechanism introduced alongside the configuration tool avoids sending requests to a new machine until it passes every reliability test and then gradually starts turning the tap.

The addition should help companies better deal with traffic spikes that require provisioning extra hardware to support. But while NGINX Plus 12 is designed to reduce the risk of errors, a problem is bound to pop up sooner or later in any environment, which is why the new version also brings an improved monitoring console that provides greater granularity into several key metrics. Administrators can now keep better track of server response times, connection errors and memory utilization among others.

Nginx is topping off the list by announcing the general availability of nginScript, a custom implementation of JavaScript that its engineers have spent more than a year and a half developing. The language can be used to write custom procedures for handling different kinds of traffic, an invaluable feature for many large websites.

Image: Nginx