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NGINX

Score9.1 out of 10

173 Reviews and Ratings

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What is NGINX?

NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications.

NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create applications with performance, reliability, security, and scale. This includes NGINX Plus for load balancing, reverse proxy, and application delivery controller features, NGINX App Protect for high performance web application firewall security, and NGINX Unit to run the application code, all monitored and managed by the NGINX Controller.
  • NGINX Plus: An all‑in‑one load balancer, web server, and content cache.
  • NGINX Controller: Centralized monitoring and management for NGINX Plus.
  • NGINX App Protect: Web application firewall, powered by F5
  • NGINX Unit: Lightweight application server, with support for multiple languages and a dynamic REST API‑driven configuration
  • NGINX Ingress Controller: Traffic management solution for cloud‑native apps in Kubernetes and containerized environments.
  • NGINX Service Mesh: Lightweight, Turnkey, Developer-Friendly Service Mesh Using NGINX Plus as an Enterprise Sidecar

Media

Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application Platform
Screenshot of NGINX Controller - Monitoring
Screenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration

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Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application Platform

Top Performing Features

  • Application server performance

    Speed of deploy time, initialization time and other performance metrics

    Category average: 8.6

  • Administration and management

    Ease of management via administration console

    Category average: 7.8

  • Installation

    Ease of download and installation

    Category average: 8.5

Areas for Improvement

  • Open-source standards compliance

    Support for open-source standards like J2EE

    Category average: 8.3

  • Security management

    Integrated security management for applications

    Category average: 8.5

  • IDE support

    Support for a number of different programming environments or IDEs

    Category average: 7.3

Nginx is a strong and reliable web server.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Nginx in our organization as a web server for Node.js applications, and as a reverse proxy for HTTP requests for backend applications such as APIs. For reverse proxy usage, we configure Nginx servers in pairs for high availability in active/passive mode. The failover is very smooth, almost with zero downtime - it loses only 1 packet during the transfer of the main role from one host to another.

Pros

  • Web Application Server.
  • Reverse Proxy.
  • High Availability for web applications.
  • Request rate limit.

Cons

  • HTTP Request Rewrite rules.
  • External modules maintained, such as mod security.
  • Request filtering.

Return on Investment

  • Positive: easy of management.
  • Negative: free license only supports active/passive mode on HA.
  • Positive: free license almost without limitations.
  • Negative: paid version too expansive.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft IIS, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing and Azure Load Balancer

Other Software Used

Microsoft IIS, Grafana Loki, Kong Gateway Community (Open Source), Portainer, NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Azure DevOps, Microsoft Visual Studio Code

NGINX user

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our organization, We need to secure the application gateway, using NGINX waf to protect the application

Pros

  • In my opinion, a secure application is done well in NGINX
  • In my experience, NGINX does stable well
  • In my experience, NGINX does reliable well

Usability

Top-tier Reliability and Performance

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our organization, We use NGINX as our primary load balancer across all our product line integrations.

Pros

  • I think Performance is done well in NGINX
  • I think Quality is done well in NGINX
  • I think Reliability is done well in NGINX

Cons

  • I think there is room for improvement in NGINX because I Would love to see more AI functionalities for this product

Return on Investment

  • The impact NGINX has on our organization's overall business objectives is NGINX's primary function to split load effectively.

Usability

Good product

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our organization, we Use NGINX as Load balancer

Pros

  • In my opinion, Performance is done well in NGINX
  • In my experience, NGINX is Stable
  • I think NGINX is Easy to configure and troubleshooting

Return on Investment

  • The impact NGINX has on our organization's overall business objectives is that, in our experience, NGINX's ROI is good, valuable

Usability

Light-weigh modular and resource optimised tool for Load Balancing and Reverse Proxy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We're using NGINX as a reverse proxy and load balancer for all projects, and it is a standard tool we use with all our clients. With NGINX, we don't have to open multiple ports for HTTP requests, nor do we have to expose real application servers. There are a lot of security measures that we handle only with NGINX.

Pros

  • We use NGINX for reverse proxy to route requests to multiple applications accepting then on same port and route them on the basis of address.
  • The other application is of load balancer where application is running them on multiple servers and it routes to servers.
  • We manage security headers, port mapping, health-check for server and applications too.

Return on Investment

  • Faster application delivery
  • Open source as per our requirement

Usability