Cloudflare has launched the Pingora project, a framework that the company has been developing to replace NGINX web servers since 2022. However, the project is not a ready-to-use web server, but rather a framework that requires coding to operate.
Within Pingora, components are designed to support protocols such as HTTP/1, HTTP/2, TLS, TCP/UDP, gRPC, WebSocket, with plans to support HTTP/3. It supports filters similar to NGINX, using Lua code in OpenResty, and can restart without cutting off connections, even just one. It can also send data to a variety of monitoring tools like syslog, Prometheus, Sentry, and OpenTelemetry.
Although Cloudflare has been using Pingora for some time now, the company warns that the API is not stable until version 1.0 is released, and there are no plans to support operating systems other than Unix.
The release of Pingora this time around has received collaboration with ISRG’s Prossimo project and Let’s Encrypt service provider, who are preparing to develop River, a ready-to-use proxy project built from Pingora. It is expected to outperform NGINX, supporting scripting in any language using WASM.
River has received collaboration from Cloudflare, Shopify, and Chainguard, with development expected to kick off in the second quarter of 2024.
TLDR: Cloudflare introduces Pingora, a framework to replace NGINX servers, offering advanced protocol support and collaboration with ISRG’s Prossimo project for the development of River, a high-performance proxy solution.
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