What is NGINX?
What is NGINX?
NGINX is a free, open-source web server software that serves as a high-performance web server, reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTP cache. It was originally developed by Igor Sysoev in 2004 to address the C10K problem—handling tens of thousands of concurrent connections efficiently. C10K problem was a term used to describe the inability of web servers to handle large numbers of concurrent connections i.e – more than 10,000.
Today, NGINX is widely used to deliver both static and dynamic web content, optimize application performance, and improve reliability across large-scale web architectures.
Install NGINX
Flow the below steps to install NGINX on Ubuntu Linux:
To install NGINX on a Debian-based Linux system like Ubuntu, you can follow the below steps:
- Launch Terminal.
- Issue the following commands:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install nginx
Start NGINX
You can start NGINX using the following command
$ sudo systemctl start nginx
NGINX as a reverse proxy
NGINX is commonly used as a reverse proxy server. A reverse proxy sits in front of backend servers (like web apps, databases, or APIs) and forwards client requests to them. With NGINX, this is often done to:
-
Distribute traffic across multiple servers (load balancing)
-
Improve performance using caching and compression
-
Provide security (hide backend servers, filter requests, SSL termination)
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Act as a gateway for microservices
So while NGINX can also function as a web server and forward proxy, one of its most popular uses is as a reverse proxy.
