Mirantis Kubernetes Engine vs. NGINX

[Mirantis Cloud Native Suite (Docker Enterprise)] is the most advanced tool till now, which works as a VMs
and separates any single application from the dependencies. Also, this tool is
helping me in the agile development of the processes. It is strongly recommended to
almost all major organizations.

Incentivized

[NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.

Incentivized

• Containers - Docker is the go-to when using Containers, which are super useful if you need an environment that works both for Windows and Linux
• Efficiency - Docker is very lightweight and doesn't demand too much from your CPU or server
• CI/CD - Docker is excellent for plumbing into your build pipeline. It integrates nicely, is reliable, and has an easy set up.

Incentivized

• Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
• Great at serving static content.
• Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
• Open-Source (no cost)!

Incentivized

• Containers are often opaque - if a container doesn't work out of the box, it's messy to fix.
• Logging is complexified by the multiple containers and logs are often not piped to places you expect them to be.
• Networking is complexified due to internal port mapping between containers, etc.

Incentivized

• Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
• I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
• It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
• It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
• I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.

Great value for the product

Incentivized

Docker's CLI has a lot of options, and they aren't all intuitive. And there are so many tools in the space (Docker Compose, Docker Swarm, etc) that have their own configuration as well. So while there is a lot to learn, most concepts transfer easily and can be learned once and applied across everything.

Incentivized

Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application. Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective. Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.

Incentivized

The community support for Docker is fantastic. There is almost always an answer for any issue I might encounter day-to-day, either on Stack Overflow, a helpful blog post, or the community Slack workspace. I've never come across a problem that I was unable to solve via some searching around in the community.

Incentivized

Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.

Incentivized

We've used XAMPP, PHPmyAdmin and similar local environments (our app is on PHP). Because of how easy you can change the configuration of libraries on PHP and versions (which is SO painful on XAMPP or other friendly LAMP local servers) we are using Docker right now. Also, being sure that the environment is exactly the same makes things easier for developing.

Incentivized

We have used Traffic, Apache, Google Cloud Load Balancing and other managed cloud-based load balancers. When it comes to scale and customization nothing beats Nginx. We selected Nginx over the others because

• we have a large number of services and we can manage a single Nginx instance for all of them
• we have high impact services and Nginx never breaks a sweat under load
• individual services have special considerations and Nginx lets us configure each one uniquely

Incentivized

• Docker has made it possible for us to deploy code faster, increasing the productivity of our development teams.
• Docker has made it possible for us to decentralize our build and release system. This means that teams can deploy on their own schedule and our dev ops team can concentrate on building better tools rather than deploying for the teams
• Docker has allowed us to virtualize our entire development process and made it much simpler to build out new data centers. This, in turn, is significantly increasing our ROI by providing a path forward for internationalization.

Incentivized

• Nginx has decreased the burden of web server administration and maintenance, and we are spending less time on server issues than when we were using Apache.
• Nginx has allowed more people in our company to get involved with configuring things on the web server, so there's no longer a single point of failure ("the Apache guy").
• Nginx has given us the ability to handle a larger number of requests without scaling up in hardware quite so quickly.

Incentivized