Nginx is free and open-source software, it can be defined as a web server which can be used as a load balancer, reverse proxy, mail proxy, and HTTP cache. In simple term, Nginx can be explained as kind of software which is used as web to to serve the large on going requests. NGINX is a very light and fast web server.
Nginx was first publicly released in 2004 by Igor Vladimirovich Sysoev, a Russian software engineer and later on founded NGINX, Inc.
Nginx uses Master slaves architecture by supporting even driven, asynchronous and nonblocking model.
As per the survey generated in 2016, by Netcraft, an Internet services company based in Bath, Somerset, England, Nginx was found to be standing second most widely used web server across all “active” sites.
There are two versions of Nginx available, OSS Nginx and Nginx Plus of which Nginx Plus offers additional features which are not included in OSS Nginx, few of the feature are listed below:
Session persistence based on cookies, Active health checks, Cache Purging API, AppDynamic, DNS service discovery integration, Datalog, Dynatrace New Relic plug-ins, Active-Active HA with config sync, Key-Value Store, on-the-fly with zero downtime updates upstream configurations and key‑value stores using Nginx Plus API and web application firewall (WAF) dynamic module.