NGINX ranks the No.1 of global web servers and has brighter future prospects

NGINX ranks the No.1 of global web servers and has brighter future prospects.

Last month, NGINX hit a major milestone. W3Techs announced that after years of steady growth in market share, NGINX has now surpassed Apache HTTP Server as the most used web server in the world.

Granted, we’re delighted that our years of technological innovation and hard work have finally been recognized, but we’re even more grateful to you, members of the NGINX community, whose trust in the evolution of website and application delivery and security has enabled us to create this platform. a milestone.

Although W3Techs only evaluated NGINX’s web service performance, over its nearly 20-year history, we’ve developed many other capabilities, including reverse proxying, load balancing, traffic shaping, caching, and security controls, that have a wide range of capabilities.

Welcomed by everyone. It can be said that NGINX has become the Swiss Army Knife™ of developers and platform operations teams.

But we will never be complacent and stand still because of this achievement. Achievements like this will only inspire us to develop more tools to help you deliver the great digital experiences users expect.

The history of NGINX

The original motivation behind NGINX’s creation was not that grand. In 2001, NGINX founder Igor Sysoev was just trying to solve a problem in his own work: Web servers were struggling to keep up with the growing number of requests. This was known at the time as the C10K problem – the problem of clients handling 10,000 simultaneous connections.

Inspired by the design of Unix and other classic distributed systems, Igor developed a lightweight, scalable, and powerful event-driven architecture that remains at the heart of NGINX today . Igor open-sourced NGINX in 2004, realizing that what he was doing might help other sites.

As stated in this infographic , contributions from the community and adoption of these contributions have continued to grow rapidly, leading to the eventual formation of NGINX, Inc. in 2011.

In the fall of 2014, NGINX Plus debuted, built on the NGINX open source software, providing enterprise customers with enhanced production-grade features and commercial support.

The NGINX team in the fall of 2014

The earnings from NGINX Plus allow us to expand our workforce over the next few years and continue to develop our open source model and business model .

In 2019, F5 , an industry-leading manufacturer of hardware security appliances and application delivery controllers (ADCs) , acquired NGINX to lead its foray into modern and cloud-native application environments.

With the accelerated adoption of microservices, APIs, and Kubernetes in recent years, our communities and customers have placed new demands on us to help them use emerging technologies and help them manage the complexities that can arise.

To this end, we have further developed tools such as NGINX Unit , a multilingual dynamic application server , as well as NGINX Ingress Controller and NGINX Service Mesh for securely managing traffic to and from Kubernetes container environments .

Container orchestration and the management and delivery of cloud-native applications are our future.

Modular architecture comes in handy

NGINX’s highly parallel, modular, event-driven architecture started out as just enabling developers and website owners to move more packets faster and more flexibly across existing servers.

The NGINX community has always recognized (sometimes one step ahead of NGINX employees) the broad possibilities of this architectural design.

They quickly realized that NGINX was capable of more than serving web pages. New use cases are born without any stipulation, documentation, or guidance.

Active users have developed hundreds of modules (over 150 and counting) that extend the functionality of NGINX. Some community members started using NGINX as an API gateway.

There are also members that associate NGINX servers together and load balance the Apache and NGINX web servers.

Many consider open source NGINX to be the ideal Ingress Controller in Kubernetes, and the potential of this use case led us to build and open source our own Ingress Controller.

The power of the community to carve the roadmap and future

We view all of this community interaction as an invaluable guide to building the additional features our users are most looking forward to.

It is no exaggeration to say that the NGINX community has always been the best source of inspiration for our product innovations.

We strive to reinvest the growing profits from our commercial customer base into the continued development of commercial and open source products.

Over the years, we have also witnessed constant changes in the community. In the early days of cloud computing, we started serving some startups. As the community that develops and deploys modern cloud-native applications continues to grow, so do we.

Today, we are a trusted partner for all major cloud vendors and many of the world’s largest enterprises in all industries. From one-person startups to giant tech companies like Adobe with global scale, everyone has become a part of the NGINX community.

More mature, but still fighting spirit

We are proud that at many large companies, not only developers use our open source software in personal sandboxes, but enterprise security and platform operations teams rely on our commercial products (including NGINX Plus ). , NGINX Controller and NGINX App Protect , etc.) to deliver critical SaaS offerings and complex modern web applications with millions of paying customers.

NGINX open source software has been and will always be at the heart of our products, and we are proud and happy that it is trusted and loved by so many developers.

At the same time, our commercial products have enhanced scalability, security and management features that provide businesses with the higher-end capabilities they need.

There is a delicate balance between meeting the needs of the open source community and expanding the competitiveness and profitability of commercial products.

When I joined NGINX many years ago, the company had less than 100 people.

Today, F5’s NGINX Product Group has more than 250 people and is still growing, and we have hundreds of employees from other F5 business units supporting the NGINX Product Group.

I am gratified that although our market share, product line and user base have grown significantly, NGINX has never forgotten its original intention and moved forward.

Success is not something we take for granted, we build up from small things to create greater possibilities.

Our emphasis on community has not changed in ten years. Community is the source of a company’s strength and an inexhaustible source of future growth.

Thank you for helping NGINX win the top spot on the website server and application server list, please continue to follow us, we will bring you more products and possibilities in the near future.

NGINX ranks the No.1 of global web servers and has brighter future prospects