Nginx (pronounced “engine-x”) is a high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, originally written by Igor Sysoev to solve the C10k problem of handling 10,000 concurrent connections. It has since become one of the most widely deployed web servers on the internet.
Common use cases include serving static files, load balancing across application servers, SSL/TLS termination, and acting as an API gateway. Its event-driven, asynchronous architecture makes it highly efficient under heavy concurrent load.