nginx is pronounced "engine x," and when we want to work with web servers, it's one of the available options.

Nginx is currently developed as open source, and its code is available on GitHub. There's also a commercial version of nginx, developed under the name nginx plus, which isn't open source and has more features than nginx — features that are typically needed in organizations or commercial projects.

Nginx was originally developed by Igor Sysoev, and its development then continued as open source. 

Igor Sysoev was born in 1970 in the former Soviet Union (present-day Kazakhstan). He graduated from Bauman Technical University in Moscow in 1994 and worked as a system administrator at Rambler from 2000 to 2011. In 2011, he founded NGINX, Inc., and 8 years later, in 2019, the company was acquired by F5 Networks, Inc.

nginx also has other projects like njs, unit, ingress, and fabric gateway, which you can check out. For example, njs is a combination of a JavaScript engine and nginx, so you can use JavaScript code to build a program that's run by njs, and you can also control nginx's configuration and behavior through JavaScript.

If you need any of the following, you can use nginx:

• Web server
• Reverse proxy
• Content cache
• Load balancer
• TCP/UDP proxy
• Mail proxy

According to a w3techs report, as of 2025, more than a third of websites (33.8%) use nginx as their web server.

As we can see, among the 1,000 highest-traffic sites in the world, 32% use nginx, and among the top one million websites, around 30% use nginx.