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, mail proxy, 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 secure 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 handle thousands of concurrent connections at the same time.
• It helps in transforming the dynamic content into static content
• It is event-based and allows you to handle multiple connections without having overhead due to 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 a 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

Conclusion:

I hope this article is helpful to you. 

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