Why learn Nginx?
Nginx is fast, flexible, and reliable. It has many features and modules that make it suitable for various scenarios and use cases.
Some of the benefits of Nginx are:
High performance: Nginx can handle high traffic and serve requests quickly using an event-driven architecture and Asynchronous I/O. Nginx can also use caching, compression, and load balancing to optimize the performance of your web applications.
Scalability: Nginx can scale horizontally and vertically to meet the growing demand of your web applications.
Security: Nginx can protect your web applications from common web attacks and vulnerabilities using security headers, SSL/TLS encryption, authentication, access control, and firewall modules. You can also use Nginx as a reverse proxy to hide the identity and location of your backend servers or applications.
Flexibility: You can also extend the functionality of Nginx using third-party modules or writing your own modules in C or Lua.
Easy to learn: The learning curve for Nginx is small. The syntax is easy to remember and use, has less keywords and concepts.
Applications built using Nginx:
Many popular websites and applications use Nginx as their web server or reverse proxy, some popular names are:
- Airbnb
- Github
- Netflix
- Shopify
- Studytonight
But talking about different product types, here is a list:
- Web servers: Nginx can serve static and dynamic content efficiently using HTTP/HTTPS protocols.
- Reverse proxies: Nginx can act as a reverse proxy to pass requests to other servers or applications and modify the headers and body of the requests and responses. You can also use Nginx as a load balancer to distribute the load among multiple servers or applications using upstream module.
- API gateways: Nginx can act as an API gateway to route requests to different microservices or APIs based on the URL path or parameters. You can also use Nginx to enforce authentication, authorization, rate limiting, logging, and monitoring for your APIs.
- Media servers: Nginx can act as a media server to stream audio and video content using RTMP protocol.
- Web application firewalls: Nginx can act as a web application firewall to protect your web applications from common web attacks and vulnerabilities. You can also use Nginx to block malicious requests based on IP address, user agent, HTTP method, or request body using deny and allow directives.
Learning Nginx will definitely help you understand how to design and deploy scalable and reliable web applications and services. We're excited to see you throughout this series.
