NGINX is at the heart of a significant portion of the modern internet. Trusted at scale for more than two decades, it helps deliver the traffic for over one third of the internet today. NGINX is the quiet workhorse behind a huge slice of the traffic you served, fetched, and clicked through today. A project of this scale needs more than technical excellence alone. It’s a responsibility; it requires an open source community capable of sustaining it, evolving it, and taking stewardship seriously.
This is why we are committed to improving both the community and the contributor experience. F5 is increasing investment into NGINX. We’re growing the team, we’re opening up the roadmap, we’re shipping more new features. We are also committed to overhauling how contributors work with us. If you’ve ever filed an issue or opened a PR and watched it drift into the void, that ends now.
A real commitment
This increased investment from F5 means more engineers, more reviewers, and more bandwidth to engage with the community. We’re expanding the NGINX team specifically to support contributors and accelerate development. We want to build a stronger community where ideas, contributions and requests are more than welcome and lead to tangible outcomes.
A public roadmap
One of the steps we have already taken is creating a public GitHub project board. No more guessing what we’re working on. You can see what’s in flight, what’s queued, and where your issue or PR sits in the bigger picture. We develop in the open. The roadmap reflects that.
A tangible result
As part of our renewed effort to strengthen the development community, we are also committing to release features that the community has been asking for. For example, in 1.29.6 we released the session persistence capability and just last week in 1.31.0 we released the HTTP CONNECT Forward Proxy, and the “least_time” load balancing scheme. Additionally, numerous other features are planned for upcoming releases, which you can see on the public project board. We’re bringing all of these capabilities into the open source core, where they belong.
A better contributor experience
Good code deserves good processes. We will be implementing response timelines to improve issue and PRs triage. Each one will get acknowledged within a clear, published window, and we will be working towards good submissions moving on and preventing stale ones from piling up. No more wondering if anyone saw it.
Code is only as good as the communication around it. We are implementing clearer communication from our side on releases and direction. What’s shipping, why, and when. We’re also scheduling NGINX community calls: public, online meetings for maintainers, contributors, and users to connect regularly to discuss NGINX development. All are welcome, and encouraged to bring PRs to unlock, questions, or request help if needed. Invitation to follow soon.
We have also created cleaner guidance, workflows and templates and put in place automation to simplify commits, PRs, reviews, and merges so you spend your time writing code, not decoding our process.
What we’re thinking about next
These are early ideas, nothing decided — your input shapes what we build:
- Enhancing the AI experience for users to help with code quality and reviewer load.
- Automating issue triage for first-pass classification and routing.
- More GitHub Actions to keep cutting friction.
- Release process improvements, standardized changelogs, smoother release workflows.
If any of these spark ideas or concerns, join us for upcoming NGINX Community Calls. We’re scheduling public NGINX community meetings quarterly for collaboration and transparency. The meetings will include discussing development, demos, and unblocking PRs and Issues, and addressing comments directly. We want to make sure the community approves future idea implementations.
How to get involved
If you’re already contributing to NGINX: thank you! If you’ve never contributed before, this is a great moment to start. Watch the roadmap ahead, hop on a community call with us, and let us know where you find rough edges. Feedback is a gift that helps us all. Your voice is how you can become a part of the community. And when you have built something, go ahead, submit a PR!
NGINX has always been community-built. F5 increasing investment into NGINX isn’t about taking it over; it’s about giving the community the support, transparency, and tooling it deserves. It’s about making the community stronger.
We’re modernizing the contribution experience because NGINX’s future depends on the people who build it. That’s you. Thank you!