NGINX
Igor Sysoev had a problem. In 2002, this Russian engineer was working for Rambler, an internet portal that was seeing hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections flooding in. The servers were struggling. Apache, the dominant solution of the time, was showing its flaws: each connection demanded its own system resources, creating a burden that became unsustainable when traffic surged. Sysoev was looking for something else, a different approach to handle this avalanche of requests.
He then set out to write a new web server, which he named NGINX (pronounced engine-x). Its architecture broke with conventions: instead of allocating a process or thread per connection, the software adopted an asynchronous, event-driven model. A master process supervised everything, a few worker processes shared the workload, and this handful of components was enough to handle thousands of requests in parallel, achieving spectacular resource efficiency.
In October 2004, Sysoev released version 0.1.0. He chose this date as a reference to the launch of Sputnik, a nod to the first artificial satellite. The code was distributed under a BSD license, freely available. The first to try it were Estonian and Russian sites like rate.ee and zvuki.ru, which used NGINX to serve their MP3 files. The newcomer proved its worth.
The software gained ground, first in the Russian-speaking sphere, then beyond. System administrators discovered its talents: serving static content with remarkable speed, acting as a reverse proxy, distributing load across multiple servers, managing cache, and serving as a FastCGI gateway. NGINX proved versatile, reliable, fast. Its reputation crossed borders.
Seven years after the first public version, in 2011, Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov founded NGINX, Inc. The idea? Offer commercial support and advanced features while preserving the open source version. Investors reacted quickly: BV Capital and Runa Capital injected 3 million dollars as early as October 2011. Other rounds followed: 10 million in 2013, 20 million in 2014, 43 million in 2018. The company developed NGINX Plus, a paid offering that complemented the community version with extended monitoring and analytics capabilities.
F5 Networks acquired NGINX in March 2019 for 670 million dollars, a striking validation of the software’s importance in contemporary web infrastructure. But the story took an unexpected turn in December of the same year: a search operation hit NGINX’s Moscow offices. Rambler, Sysoev’s former employer, claimed intellectual property rights over the code. The matter was resolved thanks to Sberbank’s intervention, a Rambler shareholder, but the episode left its mark.
On the technical front, NGINX continued to evolve. It integrated HTTP/2, refined its compression and caching mechanisms, handled headers with flexibility. Shared memory was used to store cache, manage session persistence, control throughput. This efficiency proved appealing: in 2022, over 33% of websites worldwide ran on NGINX, surpassing Apache in various categories. Platforms like WordPress.com trusted it. The software adapted to modern architectures, including microservices and cloud.
January 2022: Sysoev announced his departure from NGINX and F5. He left behind a project that had reshaped the web’s infrastructure. His latest creation, NGINX Unit, launched in 2017, targeted multilingual environments and microservices architectures. The legacy endures.
From Rambler to servers worldwide, the software grew as the web changed its face. Its success stems from clever architectural choices, a pragmatic approach to performance issues, and a successful balance between open source code and a viable business model.