Important: NGINX Plus R33 requires NGINX Instance Manager 2.18 or later
To ensure uninterrupted traffic processing, upgrade to NGINX Instance Manager 2.18 or later if your NGINX data plane instances are running NGINX Plus R33. This upgrade is necessary to support usage reporting.

NGINX Plus R33 instances must send usage data to the F5 licensing endpoint or NGINX Instance Manager. If they don’t, they will stop processing traffic.

For more information about usage reporting and enforcement, see About solution licenses.

Build and deploy images

Legacy 'nms' references
Some commands, file paths, and configuration references still use nms due to the ongoing transition from NGINX Management Suite (NMS) to NGINX Instance Manager (NIM). These will be updated in future releases.

Overview

This guide provides step-by-step instructions for building and deploying F5 NGINX Instance Manager images on different cloud providers.

The deployment process has two stages:

  • Generate an image using Packer.
  • Deploy the image using Terraform.
Open-Source Project on GitHub
The steps in this guide refer to the NGINX Instance Manager Infrastructure as Code (IAC) project on GitHub.

Before you begin

Before you start building and deploying images, ensure you:

Packer

The Packer stage involves building the cloud image and installing NGINX Instance Manager using an Ansible role. This image will be used later in the deployment stage.

Generate the image

To generate the image, follow the steps appropriate for your cloud deployment in the NGINX Instance Manager Image Generation README.

Terraform

The Terraform stage involves deploying the cloud images created during the Packer stage. There are two types of deployment examples: Basic Reference Architecture and Standalone Architecture.

Ensure you’ve built the relevant images with Packer before continuing. For the Basic Reference Architecture, you’ll need both NGINX Instance Manager and NGINX images.

Deploy basic reference architecture image

The Basic Reference Architecture deploys both the control plane (NGINX Instance Manager) and data plane (NGINX Agent) using cloud best practices. It includes:

  • Load balancers
  • NGINX Instance Manager and NGINX Agent instances in the private subnet

To deploy the Basic Reference Architecture, follow the steps in the AWS NGINX Instance Manager Basic Reference Architecture README.


Diagram showing the AWS basic reference architecture with an Amazon VPC, load balancers, and NGINX Instance Manager components in private subnets.

Figure 1. AWS NGINX Instance Manager basic reference architecture

Deploy standalone architecture image

The Standalone Architecture deploys the control plane in isolation. This is not a best practice solution but can be used as a simple deployment option for multiple clouds. The standalone architecture includes:

  • Control node in the VPC’s public subnet
  • Security groups to give restricted access

To deploy the Standalone Architecture, follow the steps for your infrastructure in the How to Use section of the NGINX Instance Manager Image Deployment README.


Diagram showing the standalone architecture for NGINX Instance Manager deployment, featuring an Amazon VPC and a public subnet with NGINX Instance Manager in an EC2 instance secured by a security group.

Figure 2. NGINX Instance Manager standalone architecture

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