Interview: Nginx's Gus Robertson

Article from ADMIN 31/2016

By Swapnil Bhartiya

The Nginx web server platform is not as well known as another open source web alternative known as Apache, but the fast and frugal Nginx is growing in popularity around the world as web admins contend with increased traffic and the challenges of container and cloud environments. We talked to Nginx CEO Gus Robertson.

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Admin Magazine: For the benefit of new users, what problem was Nginx trying to solve when the project started?

Gus Robertson: Nginx was initially written by Igor Sysoev in 2002 to address the performance limitations of available web servers for managing rapidly increasing web traffic. When Nginx launched as an open source project in 2004, it looked to solve the broader challenges faced by the World Wide Web at the time, including explosive growth of both traffic volume and web page weight. This growth posed significant challenges to the current process-per-connection web service model and opened the market for Nginx, which, from the beginning, has provided high performance, high concurrency, and low memory usage. Instead of using a threaded or process-based architecture, Nginx provides an event-driven architecture that enables it to scale easily on modern hardware.

AM: Many projects tend to go beyond their original purpose or get bloated; how much has Nginx change since its first release?

GR: Nginx has changed a lot since its first release, but we still focus on the issue Nginx was initially created to resolve: keeping up with increased demand on the web. The main difference is that we have added hundreds of new features and technical capabilities.

In September, we released our seventh iteration, R7, which includes support for the new HTTP/2 web standard, and nginScript, our JavaScript implementation. Today, Nginx open source has benefited from well over 100 new features and updates, and Nginx Plus has matured into a highly capable application delivery platform.

With regard to bloat, we do everything in our power to keep the total lines of code and complexity in our software to the absolute barest minimum. Our engineering staff are ruthless about optimizing every feature within Nginx and will re-write

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