[iolo]

F5 was very much a hardware company in a world of software vendors. The high and low end of the hardware market has shrunk rapidly as cloud has taken over. At high end, cloud providers like Amazon, Facebook and Google are building their own hardware[0] and at the other end, companies are increasingly just using those cloud providers.

For any large company, the easiest way to enter a new market is to just buy some of the competition. Of Nginx's competitors, most are either not "enterprise-y" enough (Caddy) or are already part of the CNCF (Traefik, Envoy). Really, I think the only other option could have been HaProxy.

[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-web-services-secret-wea...