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What is Nginx?

Nginx is a high-performance web server and reverse proxy first released in the early 2000s. Built around an event-driven, asynchronous architecture, it was designed to address the limitations of older process-per-connection servers and to scale efficiently on modern workloads. Nginx runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows (note: Windows builds exist but Unix-like systems—especially Linux—are the most common production platforms).
A presentation slide titled "Nginx – Introduction" with the line "It was designed to overcome the limitations of older web servers." The slide also shows performance-related icons, including a growth chart and a thumbs-up badge.
Nginx was created to compete with long-established servers like Apache and IIS that used process- or thread-per-connection models. Its non‑blocking, event-driven workers allow a single process to manage thousands of simultaneous connections with lower memory use and latency — making Nginx ideal for high-concurrency scenarios.
A slide titled "Nginx – Introduction" showing a central server icon connected by dotted arrows to five user avatar icons. It visually represents users routing or load-balancing traffic to a single server.

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Key strengths and common uses

  • Serving static content (HTML, CSS, images, audio, video) with minimal resource consumption and low latency.
  • Acting as a reverse proxy and edge server to terminate TLS, perform caching, and shield backend services.
  • Load balancing and traffic routing across multiple application servers.
  • Supporting extensibility via modules and integrations (e.g., OpenResty for Lua scripting).
Serving static content is one of Nginx’s most polished capabilities. It’s optimized to deliver assets quickly and efficiently, which is why many sites use Nginx as the front-facing server in front of application servers or CDNs.
A presentation slide titled "Serving Static Content With Nginx" showing HTML5, CSS3 and Node.js icons inside a rounded pink panel with labeled boxes for "Frontend Software" and "Videos." The subtitle reads "Effortless handling of various file types."
Under the hood, Nginx’s worker model is non-blocking and asynchronous. This design enables a single worker to handle many connections concurrently, which often yields better throughput and lower latency compared to traditional architectures that spawn one thread or process per connection. Nginx is available in both the free open source community edition and a commercially supported edition that includes additional features and professional support.
A presentation slide titled "Commercial Variant" with a turquoise box labeled "Open-Source Community Version," a purple box labeled "Commercial Paid Version," and a smaller pink bar labeled "Paid Support." Copyright KodeKloud is shown at the bottom left.
If you want the open source distribution, use nginx.org. For the commercial Nginx Plus and related products, use nginx.com. The sites are related but serve different editions and documentation.

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Adoption and market presence

Nginx has broad adoption across the web due to its performance, flexibility (reverse proxying, load balancing, caching, TLS termination), and rich ecosystem. Surveys and market analyses frequently show Nginx as one of the most used web servers globally — including significant share among top-ranked websites and in overall domain counts.
A slide titled "NGINX Metrics" showing a Netcraft market-share line chart and a table reporting web server usage, with nginx listed as the most popular server (~21% in June 2024). The left column contains short bullet points comparing nginx to OpenResty and Cloudflare.
Because of these attributes, Nginx is trusted by thousands of organizations — including many recognizable technology and media companies.
A slide titled "Testimonials" showing a grid of well-known company logos. Examples include Adobe, Atlassian, Cisco, Disney+, Instagram, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Cloudflare, GitHub, Salesforce, Netflix, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, X and Zendesk.
In the lessons that follow, we’ll explore Nginx’s architecture, configuration basics, and common deployment patterns (reverse proxy, load balancing, caching, TLS termination), showing how its design enables high performance and scalability for modern web applications.

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