NGINX Introduction
NGINX Introduction
NGINX (pronounced as “Engine-X“) is a high-performance, open-source web server and reverse proxy server. It is also used as a load balancer, HTTP cache, and API gateway. NGINX is well-known for its speed, scalability, and efficiency, particularly when handling a large number of concurrent connections.
NGINX Features
Some of the key features and uses of NGINX are as follows:
Web Server
NGINX can serve static content like HTML files, images, and videos directly to clients. It is designed to handle high traffic and perform efficiently under heavy load.
Reverse Proxy
NGINX can act as a reverse proxy, meaning it can forward requests from clients to other servers (like application servers or databases). This helps offload some of the processing from backend servers and improves performance.
Load Balancer
NGINX is commonly used as a load balancer, distributing incoming network traffic across multiple servers. This helps balance the load and increases the fault tolerance and availability of web applications.
HTTP Cache
NGINX can cache content from back-end servers (like database-driven pages or API responses) to speed up response times for subsequent requests. This reduces the load on back-end systems and improves overall performance.
SSL/TLS Termination
NGINX can handle the encryption and decryption of SSL/TLS traffic, offloading this work from application servers. This improves the performance and security of web applications.
Asynchronous Event-Driven Architecture
Unlike traditional web servers that spawn a new process for each request, NGINX uses an event-driven model that allows it to handle many connections simultaneously without consuming a lot of resources. This makes NGINX highly efficient and scalable.
URL Rewriting and Redirects
NGINX allows you to configure URL rewrites and redirects, which is useful for SEO, site migrations, or managing legacy URLs.
Security
NGINX can help enhance security by blocking malicious traffic, limiting connections from specific IPs, or filtering certain types of requests. It also integrates well with web application firewalls.
Micro-services and API Gateway
With the rise of micro-services, NGINX is commonly used as an API gateway to manage traffic between micro-services, providing routing, authentication, and rate-limiting capabilities.
More information:
- https://nginx.org/
