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# Reading the Mind of Your NGINX Fleet: A Hybrid Rule + ML Pipeline for NGINX Config Intelligence


- **Date:** Thursday, Sep 24, 2026
- **Time:** 10:20–10:50 (30 min)
- **Room:** Stage 3
- **Event:** World Congress 2026 North America

## Description

Every NGINX config encodes intent — is this a reverse proxy? an API gateway? an SSL terminator? — but that intent is never written down. At fleet scale, nobody can tell you what your configs actually do. This session shows how we taught a machine to read them.
We classify NGINX server configs into eight canonical roles using a three-stage pipeline: parse the raw config into a structured directive tree with CrossPlane, then run two complementary classifiers against it — a precision-tuned rule engine that abstains when signatures are ambiguous, and an ML model that generalizes to configs the rules don't cover. A confidence-fusion layer blends them, auto-accepting confident calls and routing borderline ones to expert review.
The counterintuitive lesson: we deliberately didn't just throw an LLM at this. The hybrid beats either approach alone — keeping rule-level precision while recovering the coverage rules lack. You'll see why "negative evidence" (the absence of a directive) is often the strongest signal, how an LLM-as-judge eval validated the design, and how a closed expert-feedback loop turns review hours into measurable accuracy gains. Live, against real configs — including yours, if you bring one.

## Speaker

### [Brandon LEE](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@brandon-lee)

AI Architect Lead at F5


## Related talks at this congress

- [Edge AI: Running Agentic Intelligence Where Internet Can't Reach](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1805-edge-ai-running) — Nitin Eusebius
- [It’s Alive! Taming the MLOps Franken-Stack: Write, Run, and Serve with Michelangelo](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1675-it-s-alive-taming) — Eric Wang, Paul Zimmerman
- [No Single Model to Rule Them All: Building Resilient AI Agents Across Open & Closed LLMs](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1671-no-single-model-to) — Emmanuel Acheampong
- [Context Engineering Kung Fu](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1410-context-engineering) — Carl Lapierre

## Watch remotely

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## Links

- [Get tickets](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/world-congress-north-america/tickets)