NGINX launches a complete new web server

NGNIX’s tagline is set to borrow Avis’s signature tagline, “When you’re number two, you try harder.” While Apache is much more popular, 50.7% compared to NGINX’s 14.4% – based on Netcraft’s web server count – NGINX is striving with its latest update, NGINX Plus Release 6 (R6), to challenge Apache for first place.

Indeed, NGINX claims, based on data from Web Technology Surveys, that its eponymous web server “now powers nearly half of the world’s top 10,000 sites and applications.” Additionally, NGINX powers Netflix, Pinterest, Airbnb, and many other high-volume sites.

The open-source NGINX has been so successful because it is very fast. It also uses far fewer resources than Apache or Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). How? ‘Or’ What? NGINX is event-based: it does not spawn new processes or threads for each web page request. Therefore, as web server load increases, memory usage remains predictable.

With this new version, NGINX introduces many improvements. These include:

Faster load balancing algorithm: Now the technology can automatically select faster, less loaded nodes for higher performance. The solution monitors the number of concurrent connections and the average response time of each node in the load balancing pool and uses this intelligence to estimate the best possible node for each request.

Full TCP Load Balancing: The TCP load balancing functionality that was introduced in NGINX Plus R5 has been significantly extended to include health checks, dynamic reconfiguration, full access logs, and SSL termination and encryption. Additionally, the NGINX Plus extended status feature now reports TCP load balancing counters.

High availability: Based on Keepalived, NGINX Plus now uses Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) to achieve high availability and failover between NGINX Plus instances.

Updated Extended Status Dashboard: NGINX Plus sports a new, richer status dashboard that traces the health and activity of NGINX Plus instances using the extended status module.

Bufferless Download Support: NGINX Plus improves the responsiveness of web applications that handle large file downloads with new “unbuffered download” options, which means the technology streams data in large HTTP requests (such as file downloads) to the server as they arrive, rather than buffering them. and to transmit the request only after receipt of its entire content.

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) authentication for Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP): NGINX Plus R6 support for SSL client authentication for SMTP traffic.

When you look at all these changes, it’s clear that NGINX is more than just a web server. It integrates high availability, load balancing, and email server support to provide businesses with a fast Internet services software stack.

As Owen Garrett, Chief Product Officer at NGINX, said in a statement, “NGINX Plus R6 represents a significant technical advancement in features that extend developer capabilities and improve overall application performance. with customers and the community to identify and solve some of the most common challenges businesses face with web application delivery, and we see the innovation behind R6 as a critical answer to these challenges and the needs of emerging markets . »

At the same time, NGINX is launching its Innovators program. This puts the commercial version of NIGNX in the hands of developers for free, if their startup makes less than $2 million in annual revenue and less than $10 million in fundraising.

The latest open source version, NGINX 1.7.12, is also available. It was last updated on April 7, 2015.

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