Nginx - use cases

Nginx is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTP cache.

Here are some common use cases for Nginx:

1. Web server: Nginx can serve static and dynamic content, handle SSL/TLS encryption, and support HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and WebSocket protocols.
2. Reverse proxy: Nginx can act as a reverse proxy for web servers, application servers, and APIs, allowing you to distribute incoming traffic among multiple servers and improve performance, scalability, and reliability.
3. Load balancer: Nginx can balance incoming traffic among multiple servers based on different algorithms, such as round-robin, IP hash, and least connections, ensuring that each server handles a fair share of the load.
4. API Gateway: Nginx can be used as an API gateway to manage and route incoming API requests to multiple backend servers, handle authentication and authorization, enforce rate limiting and caching policies, and monitor and log API traffic.
5. Microservices architecture: Nginx can be used in a microservices architecture to route requests to different services based on the path, header, or query parameters, perform service discovery and load balancing, and manage TLS termination and encryption.
6. Container orchestration: Nginx can be used in containerized environments, such as Kubernetes or Docker Swarm, to act as a reverse proxy, load balancer, or ingress controller, and manage traffic routing, service discovery, and SSL/TLS termination.
7. Web application firewall (WAF): Nginx can be used as a WAF to filter and block incoming traffic based on predefined rules or custom scripts, and protect web applications from common attacks, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF).
8. HTTP cache: Nginx can cache frequently accessed content, such as images, videos, and HTML pages, and serve them directly from memory or disk, reducing the response time and network traffic.
9. Content delivery network (CDN): Nginx can build a CDN by caching and delivering static content from geographically distributed edge servers, reducing the latency and bandwidth usage for end users.
10. High availability and fault tolerance: Nginx can be deployed in a highly available and fault-tolerant architecture, using techniques such as active-passive and active-active clustering, health checks, and automatic failover.