What is NGINX? - A Beginners Guide
In this Article, we will learn about NGINX and why we should use it.
What is NGINX?
NGINX is an open-source web server that can also be used for reverse proxy, HTTP Cache and load Balancer.
It can be scaled efficiently as a web server as well as a reverse proxy.
NGINX also helps in setting up a secured connection between your data-centers and the outside network.
It also works well as an HTTP load balancer that allows you to use multiple different load-sharing mechanism.
How does NGINX Works?
NGINX is famous for low memory usage and high concurrency.
NGINX uses an asynchronous, event-driven approach and events are handled in a single thread.
Advantages of using NGINX:
- NGINX is asynchronous and each request is executed concurrently without blocking other requests , which helps handling thousands of concurrent connections at the same time.
- It helps in transforming the dynamic content to static content
- It is event-based and allows you to handle multiple connections without having overhead due to the context switching.
- It shows compatibility with commonly-used web applications like ruby ,python, joomla, etc...
- It uses less memory and resources.
Disadvantages of using NGINX:
- It comes with small community support as compared to Apache but has more use cases than apache.
- It does not offer you many modules and extensions as compared to apache
Why use NGINX?
- It provides a single entry point
- Caching
- Zero downtime
It provides a single entry point:
Within the containerized environment, you can deploy or destroy the containers whenever required, but having a single entry point for the users to access the services is better approach.
NGINX is a better solution to provide it.
Caching:
NGINX server provides a cache for both static and dynamic content, which enhance the performance.
Zero Downtime:
NGINX ensure smooth working of the webserver/
Important Features of NGINX:
1.Reverse Proxy with Caching
2.Load Balancing
3.FastCGI support with caching
4.WebSockets
5.TLS/SSL with SNI
6.Handling of static files, index files and auto-indexing
