What Is NGINX Open-Source Web Server Software?
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What Is NGINX?
NGINX is web server software that offers multiple purposes, including a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) cache, load balancer, mail proxy and reverse proxy. NGINX is free, open-source software, developed by Igor Sysoev and released publicly in 2009.
According to W3Techs' regularly updating data, NGINX is the most widely used web server on the internet, powering 33.1 percent of the world's websites in February 2022. NGINX is followed by Apache (30.7 percent) and Cloudflare (22.1 percent). Furthermore, NGINX powers 45 percent of the world's 1,000 most popular websites and 34.1 percent of the top one million websites.
NGINX software was initially developed to solve the C10k web server issue, which involved network sockets receiving vast volumes of concurrent connection requests. The software has evolved to address enterprises' needs and can be paired with solutions like HPE Cloud Services. F5 Networks acquired NGINX for $670 million in 2019, and F5 NGINX continues to offer a range of solutions to customers.
What are the NGINX modules?
F5 NGINX provides a range of solutions that offer different business purposes, including:
Controller: NGINX Controller is a self-service, application programming interface (API)-driven platform that accelerates deployment and simplifies lifecycle management. It was the first app-centric, multicloud application platform, which accelerates time to market by bringing app deployment times from months to minutes. NGINX Controller is cloud-native, offers high performance, security and enables simple integration with CI/CD workflows. This makes the automation and orchestration of apps and APIs ideal for hybrid and microservices architectures.
NGINX Plus: NGINX Plus is a simple, cloud-native all-in-one API gateway, content delivery network, load balancer, reverse proxy and web server. It enables enterprise-grade features such as active health checks, high availability, Domain Name Server (DNS) system discovery, RESTful API and session persistence. Capabilities like NGINX load balance allow you to integrate advanced monitoring, orchestrate Kubernetes containers, strengthen security controls, and debug and diagnose complex application architectures.
Ingress Controller: NGINX Ingress Controller is a traffic management solution for cloud-native apps in containerized and Kubernetes environments. The tool combines performance and speed with security and trust, ensuring high-performance agility, scalability, security and strength. Ingress Controller offers performance monitoring and visibility that enable you to pinpoint and rapidly fix performance bottlenecks and unusual behavior.
App Protect: NGINX App Protect is a modern application security solution protecting against advanced threats and hard-to-detect attacks. It offers a robust web application firewall (WAF) and app-level denial of service (DoS) security defense, ensuring you deliver apps seamlessly and securely from code to customer.
Instance Manager: NGINX Instance Manager is a management solution that enables you to configure and maintain all your NGINX instances. It provides an intuitive interface, offers automated configuration and monitoring, and ensures all proxies and web servers are fixed for active common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs).
Service Mesh: NGINX Service Mesh enables you to control Kubernetes deployments through a unified, high-performance data plane. The solution ensures enterprise-grade performance, scalability and traffic management, as well as seamless load balancing and encryption and identity features.
Amplify: NGINX Amplify is a free, simple but powerful software as a service (SaaS) monitoring tool. Amplify enables you to monitor the performance of components like application servers, databases and operating systems, track infrastructure assets and enhance configuration.
Unit: NGINX Unit is a dynamic app server that provides the foundation for your service mesh. The tool enables you to configure apps in real-time and can be tailored to the demands of your microservices.
What are NGINX use cases?
F5 NGINX's modules offer a range of crucial enterprise use cases, including:
Application delivery control: F5 NGINX's software reduces the cost and time to market for app delivery. It offers high scalability and can be deployed and easily integrated into any environment without ripping and replacing hardware. It also simplifies the move to modern infrastructures, such as DevOps and microservices.
API management: NGINX enables you to manage and secure business-critical APIs and simplify your API gateways. The software also allows you to define and publish APIs to multiple environments, authenticate and authorize your APIs, and monitor application performance.
Secure, scalable microservices: F5 NGINX provides flexible, secure microservices through features like caching, load balancing, end-to-end encryption and Layer 7 routing.
Web performance: NGINX's software ensures high-level performance and browsing experiences. It significantly improves site speed, reduces page load times and bandwidth usage, and offers rapid encryption performance.
How can World Wide Technology help with F5 NGINX?
F5 NGINX's modules are critical to helping enterprises keep data and users secure against the increasingly sophisticated cyber threat landscape. WWT helps you use NGINX modules to secure your microservices and modern applications. Discover how by signing up for our NGINX Explore Lab.