Why test Nginx Plus?

Nowadays Nginx is one of the most popular web server/reverse proxy and loadbalancer, let alone as Ingress/IngressController on Kubernetes which was one of the first implementations and the most used.
Nginx offers (among the other products) is tiered in 2 levels: the open source, and the plus implementation.
The Plus implementation offers, beyond the functionalities offered by the open source version, many other interesting features (for a more detailed comparison look at this comparison):

Active/Passive application health checking
Activity monitoring
Advanced Loadbalancing
Reconfiguration on-the-fly
Extended logging capabilities
Adaptive media streaming
High availability setup

I’ve tried the healthcheck feature on the minio cluster (check the article), and also the dashboard to check the current state of the web server. I’m also planning to test the extended logging and the high availability setup.

Ask for a license

The license is available ONLY for side NON-commercial projects. In order to request the license you have to send an email to the devsupport explaining why you need a dev license; I wrote a few lines about what I’m doing and one sentence on what I want to do with the Plus version of Nginx.
After a while (some days) you will receive a code that must be filled in the developer license portal.

The developer porta

After that you will receive a mail with an activation URL to download the key for the license. To install Nginx Plus on your distribution (Nginx Plus is a different package from Nginx open source), check the repo_setup site.

Conclusions

Nginx Plus has many interesting features and the Nginx’s dev support is very kind to provide a free license for home/side projects.