The history of Nginx: from Igor Sysoev to F5 acquisition

The architecture of efficiency

Igor Sysoev began Nginx development in 2002 to solve the C10k problem. He released the software in 2004. Nginx is an HTTP web server, a reverse proxy, a load balancer, and a mail proxy. It uses an asynchronous event-driven approach rather than threads. This design gives the software predictable performance under high loads. Nginx is the most popular web server according to Netcraft. It also exists as one of the most popular Docker images. It powers multiple Ingress Controllers for Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers into logical units for easy management and discovery. Nginx handles static files, index files, and auto-indexing. It supports HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. You already know that Nginx excels at serving static content. Nginx handles more than 10,000 simultaneous connections with a low memory footprint of about 2.5 MB for every 10,000 inactive HTTP keep-alive connections while it utilizes an asynchronous event-driven approach instead of using threads to manage requests.

The software includes modules for gzipping, byte ranges, chunked responses, XSLT, SSI, and image transformation. It manages SSL and TLS SNI support. It supports gRPC and WebSockets since version 1.3.13. The software performs load balancing with in-band health checks. It allows for name-based and IP-based virtual servers. The rewrite module uses regular expressions for URI changing. Nginx provides response rate limiting and IP-based geolocation. It supports the PUT, DELETE, MKCOL, COPY, and MOVE methods. The software handles FLV and MP4 streaming. It also allows for A/B testing, request mirroring, and the use of the njs scripting language. Nginx is compatible with Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, macOS, and Windows.

Corporate shifts and the Rambler dispute

Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov founded Nginx, Inc. in July 2011. F5 acquired Nginx, Inc. in March 2019 for $670 million. This acquisition changed the software’s trajectory. Nginx, Inc. raised $3 million from BV Capital, Runa Capital, and MSD Capital in October 2011. It raised $10 million in a series B round in October 2013. This round included participation from Aaron Levie, the CEO and founder of Box.com. In December 2014, the company raised a $20 million series B1 round led by New Enterprise Associates. In June 2018, Nginx, Inc. raised $43 million in a series C round led by Goldman Sachs.

In December 2019, police raided the Moscow offices of Nginx, Inc. They detained Sysoev and Konovalov under a search warrant for a copyright claim by Rambler. Sberbank owns 46.5 percent of Rambler. Sberbank called for an extraordinary meeting to ask Rambler to stop the criminal case and talk with F5. Sysoev left F5 in January 2022. The 2019 Moscow raid and the detention of the founders by police under a copyright claim from Rambler created significant instability for the company.

Fragmentation of the open source community

The F5 takeover led to development splits. In late 2022, former developers released Angie, which is an open source fork of Nginx. Igor Sysoev does not work on Angie. In February 2024, Maxim Dounin created frenginx. Dounin is a core developer of Nginx. He created frenginx after he criticized the interference from F5 with the development of the software.

NGINX Unit is an open-source web application server released in 2017. It targets multi-language microservices-based applications. The initial release supported Go, PHP, and Python. Later versions added support for Java, Node.js, Perl, and Ruby. NGINX Unit includes dynamic configuration, request routing, and load balancing. Maintainers archived NGINX Unit in October 2025. Will the community find a way to preserve the original vision?