This article was originally published at https://www.blog.duomly.com/6-most-popular-backend-questions-and-answers-for-beginners/#what-is-nginx-tutorial-for-beginners

What is NGINX?

NGINX started to be known as an open-source web server, but now it’s also used as a reverse proxy, HTTP cache, and load balancer. As a web server, It was designed for maximum performance and stability.

To make it simple and understandable, let me explain how the web server works. When you try to open a website, the browser sends a request to the server, then the server looks for the requested sources and returns it to the browser. Of course, requests are usually much more complicated.

The process described above is a single thread, and usually, the web server creates a thread for every request, but NGINX makes it a different way.

NGINX manages similar threads as a one process worker, and each process workers have smaller units, called worker connections. Process connections deliver the request to the worker process, and the worker process delivers it to a master process, and the request is returned to the browser.

NGINX can process thousands of requests.

Let’s visualize the usage of NGINX in the application.

Thank you for reading,
Anna from Duomly