Apache Tomcat vs Nginx

• Deploying and un deploying .war files is simple using either tomcat manager or the tomcat scripts
• Setting up is extremely easy, does not take much experience to set up the first time
• Startup and shutdown scripts are easily customizable.

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• Straight-forward configuration format that users of all skill levels can learn, and yet is powerful enough for the huge breadth of features that Nginx provides.
• Massive scale right out the box. We've never had a Nginx instance overwhelmed by requests, and if we did it would be trivial to spin up more Nginx instances to handle the load.
• SSL termination means that we can deliver content over HTTPS without needing our individual services to require TLS support. This saves us a lot of time and headache while keeping us secure.
• Nginx is open-source and free, meaning that anyone can use it to power their services, from individual projects to billion-dollar websites.

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• Using tomcat manager to troubleshoot is not very informative. Error messages are vague, you have to dig into log files for more information about the problems.
• Is great for simple web applications, but may not work for heavy development which may require a full J2EE stack, might like JBoss better.
• Security in tomcat is not straightforward, as I discovered that you have to understand how to set up realms in tomcat in order to hash passwords, which I was not overly familiar with, which is a big deal when setting up users in the tomcat-users.xml file.

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• The open-source flavor of Nginx does not support automatic service discovery. In the time of Docker containers, Kubernetes and other managed cloud services, it can be difficult to manually update Nginx configurations as services change.
• Nginx is quite heavy for smaller projects and low-traffic scenarios. It requires knowledge of operating and configuring, which is separate from operating the main web server. There are managed alternatives that will get web services up faster and be more reliable.
• Nginx-plus has some very valuable tools that projects of any size could take advantage of. Unfortunately, it is very expensive as it includes SLA and support, putting it out of reach of all but the most well-funded projects.

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• Tomcat is cheap and very quick to deploy, so it has benefited much when situation needs applications to be deployed quickly without wasting time on licensing and installations.
• Plenty of documentation available so no vendor training is required. Support contract is not needed as well.

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• Really makes a lot of Docker workflows doable that would be frustrating otherwise

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