Nginx

High-performance HTTP web server, reverse proxy, content cache, and load balancer built on an event-driven, asynchronous architecture. Handles static content, SSL termination, and proxying to backend application servers while keeping memory usage low under high concurrency. Also supports TCP/UDP proxying and mail proxy capabilities, originally written by Igor Sysoev and distributed under the 2-clause BSD License.

nginx powers a large share of the world's busiest websites and is the default choice for many cloud-native and high-traffic deployments. Compared to Apache httpd, it stands out through its event-driven model that scales better under many concurrent connections, and its declarative configuration focused on proxy and load-balancing workflows. Widely packaged in Linux distributions and cloud platforms, with commercial support and enterprise offerings available from F5.

Key capabilities:

• Reverse proxy with load balancing, health checks, sticky sessions, and support for HTTP, FastCGI, uWSGI, SCGI, and gRPC upstreams
• HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and QUIC support with built-in SSL/TLS termination
• Content caching, compression, and streaming media: HLS, MP4, FLV
• WebSocket proxying, request mirroring, rate limiting, and access control
• NGINX JavaScript (njs) for scripting and dynamic configuration without external runtimes

Teams deploy nginx to serve static assets, terminate TLS in front of application backends, distribute traffic across multiple upstream servers, and cache responses to reduce load on origin servers. Common patterns include proxying to Node.js, Python, or PHP application servers, load balancing Kubernetes ingress traffic, and acting as an API gateway with rate limiting and authentication.