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Web Servers and SOA: Growth in Services Causes Shift from Apache to NGINX For Better Speed and Scalability
Apache and Microsoft IIS and Nano web server technology account for the majority of today’s production web servers. But times change and technology evolves. A relatively new open-source web server called nginx (Pronounced “Engine X”) is slowly eroding market share from the two leaders. Nginx now holds nearly 14 percent of web server market share.
Nginx has become the web server of choice for high performance web sites. In 2013 Alexa ranked Nginx as the most frequently used web server among the top 1000 busiest web sites. In 2015 it was ranked as the top web server for the 10,000 sites with the heaviest traffic. In 2015 it ranked as the most popular site with the 100,000 busiest sites. Nearly 50 percent of the top 1000 busiest web sites use Nginx today.
Chris Lea, developer and contributor to Node.js, said that “Apache is like Microsoft Word, it has a million options but you only need six. NGINX does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache.”
The LAMP stack has been popular for a long time. People now are changing to use the LEMP stack. [The LEMP acronym stands for Linux, nginx, MySQL, and PHP.]
Owen Garrett, head of products at NGINX, said that “the traditional LAMP and LEMP approaches are rooted in the three-tier, Java 2 Enterprise Edition architecture. Modern organizations are moving away from that and toward microservices, and from my perspective, microservices is just a second generation of services-oriented architecture. But it is SOA using more modern and more lightweight protocols and virtualization such as containers, and it is open source at its roots. The original SOA approach was a little bit strangled by the large vendors that were driving the direction. Microservices needs some sort of HTTP receiver and gateway at the front of that turbulent, chaotic environment where the application is deployed and continuously changing, but itself does not change at such a rapid rate.”