End of Sale Notice:

F5 NGINX is announcing the End of Sale (EoS) for NGINX Controller API Management Module, effective January 1, 2024.

F5 maintains generous lifecycle policies that allow customers to continue support and receive product updates. Existing NGINX Controller API- Management customers can continue to use the product past the EoS date. License renewals are not available after September 30, 2024.

See our End of Sale announcement for more details.

End of Sale Notice:

F5 NGINX is announcing the End of Sale (EoS) for NGINX Controller Application Delivery Module, effective January 1, 2024.

F5 maintains generous lifecycle policies that allow customers to continue support and receive product updates. Existing NGINX Controller Application Delivery customers can continue to use the product past the EoS date. License renewals are not available after September 30, 2024.

See our End of Sale announcement for more details.

Release Notes 3.18.1

These release notes contain information about new features, improvements, known issues, and bug fixes in the NGINX Controller API Management Module.

We encourage you to install the latest version of the NGINX Controller APIM module to take advantage of the newest features and updates.

Technical support is provided for earlier versions that were released within two years of the current release.

See Also:

For related installation documentation, refer to the following publications:

• NGINX Controller Installation Guide
• NGINX Controller Technical Specifications Guide

Important:

Upgrading from NGINX Controller 3.x to NGINX Controller API Management Module 3.18 or later

NGINX Controller 3.x includes the NGINX Controller Application Delivery Module (ADC) and NGINX Controller API Management Module (APIM).

Starting with APIM 3.18, the ADC and APIM Modules are released independently on different schedules.

If you’ve installed NGINX Controller 3.18 or earlier before July 2021, we recommend you use the ADC Module going forward.

However, if you want to upgrade to APIM 3.18 or later, we recommend you upgrade to NGINX Controller 3.17 first.

July 23, 2021

Upgrade Considerations

Take note of the following considerations when upgrading to this version of the NGINX Controller API Management Module:

• After upgrading NGINX Controller, make sure to upgrade the NGINX Controller Agent too.

• If you’re upgrading NGINX Controller on a multi-node cluster, run the update.sh script on each node individually – the order in which you update the nodes doesn’t matter.

  Warning:
  Never update the control nodes in parallel. Doing so may result in race conditions for certain jobs, such as database migrations, and may cause the cluster to become unavailable.

Known Issues

The following issues are known to be present in this release. Look for updates to these issues in future release notes.

• Upgrade from NGINX Controller v3.10 to NGINX Controller API Management Module v3.18.1 will fail (26957)

  Upgrading NGINX Controller 3.10 to NGINX Controller API Management Module 3.x is not supported. Upgrade attempts will fail.

• Additional steps required to upgrade Controller Agents when updating from NGINX Controller 3.9.0 to NGINX API Management Module 3.18.1 (27030)

  After updating NGINX Controller 3.9 to NGINX APIM 3.18.1, it is not possible to upgrade the controller-agent completely without additional steps

  Workaround:

  To make sure that the Controller Agents are upgraded completely:

  • Upgrade NGINX Controller the normal documented way
  • Upgrade the Controller Agents the normal documented way

  At this stage you will see the Agents are still not online in the Infrastructure > Instances section and you will not be able to make config changes. Follow these additional steps to complete the upgrade:

  • ssh into each Instance and edit the /etc/controller-agent/agent.conf file and append the following lines in the [cloud] section, after the line requests_ca_bundle =

    grpc = true
    grpc_common_server_name =
    grpc_command_server_name = dataplane-manager
    grpc_metrics_server_name = agent-ingest
    

  • Restart each controller-agent service with the command sudo service controller-agent restart.

  Now, in Infrastructure > Instances, the Instances will appear as Running and you can push config changes.

Supported NGINX Plus Versions

NGINX Controller works with the following NGINX Plus versions:

• NGINX Plus R24
• NGINX Plus R23
• NGINX Plus R22
• NGINX Plus R21
• NGINX Plus R20
• NGINX Plus R19