Announcing v3 of NGINX Agent!

[nginx-seanmoloney]

📢 Announcing v3 of NGINX Agent!

We are excited to announce that version 3.0 of NGINX Agent is on its way! This major release builds on top of the success version 2.0 by introducing a Management Plane Interface (MPI), Opentelemetry metrics, design and performance improvements. The NGINX Agent team are committed to building an application that can be easily installed and used in conjunction with NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source.

🚨 Important Notice: Breaking Change in v3.0

As part of this update, we want to draw your attention to important breaking changes that will impact all users upgrading from v2.x to v3.0. This change is necessary to improve the management of NGINX Configurations, Instances but also the metrics that we provide.

Note, there is potential for other changes closer to the release date, any future updates will be posted here!

What's Changing?

• Introduction of the Management Plane Interface (MPI)
  • The Management Plane Interface (MPI) is a specification defining the functionality exposed by an NGINX Management Server in the form of gRPC services. The NGINX Agent connects to a Management Server such as NGINX Instance Manager (NIM), in order to administer an NGINX Instance (OSS, Plus, or Unit).
• Mock Management Plane for testing purposes
• Embedded OpenTelemetry metrics
• Improved Performance and error handling

Impact on Existing Users

If you are currently using v2.x, this change may require modifications to your existing codebase. Specifically:

• Metrics

  • The processing and exporting of metrics will change significantly in the NGINX Agent v3.0 with the adoption of the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) Specification. For more information see https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otlp/

• Configuration Apply and Configuration Upload

  • Configuration Management and Configuration Upload will now use the MPI

• Instance Groups

  • Instance Groups are now called Config Sync Groups

• Changes to NGINX Agent Configuration file, format will still be in YAML but there will be some changes to keys.

• Event notifications will be in OTEL format in the future, this will be added post v3.0 General Availability.

• For developers currently using the NGINX Agent v2 sdk, changes will be required to migrate to the new v3 version of the NGINX Agent.

Thank You!

We appreciate the support from the community as we continue to add improvements to the NGINX Agent. If you have any features or ideas you would like the team to look work on, please feel free to reach out on Github page https://github.com/nginx/agent/discussions/categories/ideas