Though NGINX became famous as the fastest web server, because it can handle a high volume of connections, NGINX is commonly used as a reverse proxy and Load Balancer to manage incoming traffic and distribute it to slower upstream servers – anything from legacy database servers to microservices.
NGINX also is frequently placed between clients and a second web server, to serve as an SSL/TLS terminator or web accelerator. Acting as an intermediary, NGINX efficiently handles tasks that might slow down your web server, such as negotiating SSL/TLS or compressing and caching content to improve performance. Dynamic sites, built using anything from Node.js to PHP, commonly deploy NGINX as a content cache and reverse proxy to reduce load on application servers and make the most effective use of of the underlying hardware.
