A Containerized WAF to Secure Apps and APIs

Applications today have different performance, privacy, and security considerations. Many likely have distinct optimal routing needs. Most are hosted in different environments. Organizations today need a unified solution that can be applied for applications deployed nearly anywhere-in public clouds, private clouds, and on premises. NGINX App Protect WAF delivers that unified solution.

In addition to its robust web application firewall (WAF) capabilities, significant improvements have been made to the architecture of NGINX App Protect WAF. Prior releases of NGINX App Protect (through 4.x) have been delivered as packaged software and this will continue with the NGINX App Protect WAF 4.x release.

But a new version of NGINX App Protect WAF, version 5.0, is designed for public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises deployments in a containerized form factor, which reduces the attack surface. NGINX App Protect WAF 5.0 introduces innovations that enable businesses to protect modern apps and APIs in containerized environments with a smaller footprint. NGINX App Protect WAF 5.0 not only supports both NGINX OSS and NGINX Plus, but also separates the control and data planes, enhancing agile development methodologies. NGINX App Protect 5.0 supports a standalone policy management container and brings the following value to customers:

• Prevents impact of heavy lift policy modifications to affect data traffic or data plane compute resources
• Accelerates deploy and reload durations, making it faster to operate and scale

Because it's designed for cloud and hybrid deployments, the containerized form factor approach of NGINX App Protect WAF 5.0 is optimized for DevOps teams using agile pipelines and CI/CD frameworks to build and maintain their applications.

NGINX App Protect 5.0 can address the desire for a unified, consistent app and API security solution, as it can be leveraged in public clouds, private clouds, and on premises. NGINX App Protect 5.0 also simplifies updates and upgrades. With its new architecture, NGINX App Protect 5.0 requires only the compiler to be rebuilt with updated signatures. And NGINX App Protect 5.0 supports NGINX in any form factor, including virtual machines and containers.

To be clear, though, NGINX App Protect 5.0 is not replacing NGINX App Protect 4.x. Both will be offered to customers to address their specific deployment needs, with NGINX App Protect 4.x continuing to be updated and offered as a packaged product and NGINX App Protect 5.0 and later being provided as a container supporting Docker or Kubernetes.