NGINX, Inc, now part of F5, is the company behind the popular open source project. It offers a range of technologies for developing and deploying modern applications. The joint NGINX and F5 solution bridges the gap between NetOps and DevOps, through multi-cloud application services that extend from code to the customer.
Feature set
Nginx is modular and through its various modules supports techniques such as load balancing and reverse proxying, name- and IP-based virtual hosts, FastCGI, direct access to memcached cache, SSL, Flash video streaming, the WebSocket protocol and more. With the Naxsi module, nginx can also act as a web application firewall.
Deployment:
Nginx was specifically designed to meet the needs of the projects of the major Russian search engine Rambler, where it is still used today. Due to its versatility, high performance and good configurability, nginx is used by many other large services such as WordPress.com, GitHub, SourceForge, ComputerBase, Golem.de, FastMail, Wikimedia, ImageShack, Hulu, Doodle and Netflix. Due to its small size and reverse-proxy functionality, nginx is also popular for disguising the true address of botnet control servers. According to Netcraft statistics, as of October 2015, 16.65% of all web servers included in the statistics were running nginx; in absolute numbers, this is 146,229,307 The currently most widely used web server, Apache, continues to cede portions of its market placement to nginx, Google Web Server, and Microsoft Internet Information Services. Reasons for this are the lower resource consumption, ever more extensive support for projects such as Parallels Plesk and the free BSD license.
With the release of the OpenBSD 5.2 operating system, nginx was shipped as an alternative to the Apache 1.3 based web server and announced to replace Apache completely with nginx in the future, which was implemented with the OpenBSD 5.5 release. However, Nginx was removed from the OpenBSD base system again on August 26, 2014, as the in-house httpd service is to be given preference. Apache and nginx are still available for OpenBSD as so-called ports, however.