NGINX (pronounced “engine x”) is a open source web server. Since its public launch in 2004, Nginx has focused on high performance, high concurrency and low memory usage. Features like load balancing, caching, access and bandwidth control, and the ability to integrate efficiently with a variety of applications, have helped to make Nginx a platform of choice for enterprise website architectures.
These days applications rule the world. They aren’t just tools that run people’s workplaces—they now run people’s lives. Demand for immediate response, flawless behavior, and even more features is unprecedented. And of course people expect applications to work equally well across any type of devices, especially on mobile. Needless to say, how fast application performs is just as important as what it does!
Today businesses face constant pressures to improve web performance and accelerate time-to-market in order to be competitive.
Today there is a paradigm shift happening from monolithic application architectures to distributed applications. This approach helps improve development efficiencies resulting in faster response time to market.
From the technical standpoint, distributed applications can also generate more internal traffic , and are sometimes harder to secure. Furthermore, as the application becomes more sophisticated, the traffic flow gets more complex and application developers need more control over how it is routed in order to optimize their application.
Traditionally hardware networking appliances and team of network engineers most of the used to work on work on resolving complexities of TCP/IP sometimes HTTP and optimization of application traffic.
With modern web architectures and in the days of “the Cloud” application system engineers typically want software tools to tackle complexities, related to the network effects from application perspective and to the HTTP. However, most application frameworks do not provide any good means to quickly and effortlessly deal with any of the “HTTP heavy-lifting”.
Application teams no longer build and then hand off to someone else to deploy and operate—they must build, deploy, and repeat the cycle.
NGINX Plus combines the functionality that was previously only available from a high-end ADC (“application delivery controller”) and the best-of-breed web acceleration techniques that were battle-tested through the 10-years history of its parent product—the NGINX open-source web server. It is the same software-only, compact, and extremely efficient product that’s been powering over 40% of the top websites like Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Netflix, Dropbox, Box and more.
NGINX Plus is the ideal platform to deliver modern web applications, and to encapsulate and effortlessly accelerate legacy monolithic web stacks. NGINX Plus ensures the applications always achieve the performance and reliability the business needs, and can scale as the business grows.
NGINX originated from the world of application software with a very specific goal of making the web infrastructure holistically faster. It has never been a networking tool, or a firmware ripped out of a box. NGINX can scale sub-linearly, offering unparalleled efficiency and price-performance ratio.
Out-of-the box NGINX Plus offers all the common web app acceleration techniques like HTTP load balancing, URI (path-)switching, SSL termination, bandwidth control, scalable content caching, and web security policies.
Over the past few years, NGINX Plus evolved to be just the right tool for the application developers and application system engineers, looking around for a proven template for web acceleration.

– Sandeep Khuperkar I CTO and Director, Ashnik