Difference between openresty and tengine

[CMCDragonkai]

I saw that Taobao originally sponsored the development of openresty but now they focus on tengine. What's the relationship between openresty and tengine? Is there a place that compares the 2?

[agentzh]

@CMCDragonkai Taobao originally sponsored the development of openresty when I was still working there. The "sponsorship" was just that I could work on this opensource project at $work (and I also used it for Taobao's data products at $work). Taobao is a very big company, Tengine is developed by the Taobao Core Systems department while I was from the Data Product & Platform department.

Below goes my personal opinion:

The most important difference between these two is that OpenResty sticks to be a bundle rather than an Nginx fork. The OpenResty team works closely with the official Nginx team and ensure that changes (mostly bug fixes) keep merging into the mainstream nginx. Tengine makes much more dramatic changes (especially big features) to the nginx core but I'm always worried that it will hurt backward compatibility in the long run when the official nginx does the same thing in a different and incompatible way (Tengine still tries to follow the mainstream nginx, which can be really a struggle).

There is also some relationship in that the Tengine includes some core components of OpenResty, notably the ngx_lua module (though its version is almost always lagging behind). Some of the Tengine team members also contribute to OpenResty's components.

[CMCDragonkai]

Thanks for the information. This would be great if it was on the front page or README.

[agentzh]

@CMCDragonkai OpenResty is not involved in the Tengine project (nor am I), and I don't see why it should be put on the front page on README in the first place. It could be on a FAQ page though :)

[CMCDragonkai]

Yep that would be great.

[agentzh]

Consider it resolved.

[bwalia]

Thanks @agentzh as always for your valiant efforts to keep things on track. However if I was building a web router service for 1000s of sites which one should I use openresty or tengine? Regards / Balinder

[agentzh]

@bwalia I would definitely recommend OpenResty, or even better, our commercial OpenResty Edge product: https://openresty.com

[bwalia]

This is really interesting. I have started building Web UI too for ops guys and 2nd level engineers. I should have known about openresty edge. Well I spend a lot time now. However just ignoring that side of things what we also require is real time bot mitigation, redirect services for example any non technical user can can add https://www.sun.com/sports redirect to http//www.thesunsports.com and immediately it purges caches etc and starts to redirect traffic micro site. Also auto https provisioning and renewals. Perhaps from letsencrypt. Also Edge side caching with real time purging and caching with business rules. I am really impressed with your edge offering so far. It seems you are on the right track going to PAAS model and big players like akamai and Fastly. Well now I know I will keep an eye on it. By the way is edge also open source? Or can I get involved in any way or form?

[agentzh]

@bwalia The OpenResty Edge product already supports real-time global cache purges, and also purging by tags and any custom conditions. And the automatic https provisioning and renewals support with Letsencrypt in the OpenResty Edge product is easy to add and well under way (we can speed up this feature's development if real customers request this) though it's already possible with our RESTful API to automate the global SSL certificate updates. The real time bot mitigation and redirect services are already very easy to do with web forms in our OpenResty Edge Admin system, a centralized web console, even for nontechnical persons.

We do sell software licenses of OpenResty Edge, not really doing the PAAS model. Our customers deploy the whole OpenResty Edge software in their own machines, even though some times we can agree to host a dedicated Admin system upon the request of some of our customers.

The OpenResty Edge product is not an open source project. It's a commercial product we're selling. The best way to get involved is to become one of our paid customers and we can closely work with you to make Edge fit your needs best and to support you to customize and extend the Edge platform in your own way.