Understanding Nginx: HTTP Server, Reverse Proxy, and Scalable Architecture

This article explains how a plain text file can be displayed in a browser by adding HTML tags and saving it with an .html suffix, turning it into a web page.

To serve HTML files stored on a remote server, a process that provides an HTTP service (a URL) is required. The browser sends an HTTP request to this process, which returns the HTML content.

The article then introduces the concept of a reverse proxy: a front‑end process that receives client requests and forwards them to multiple back‑end services, enabling load balancing and hiding the actual server addresses.

It describes Nginx’s design: a single‑threaded event loop for handling connections, multiple worker processes for parallelism, a master process for managing workers, shared memory for coordination, and a proxy cache for response caching.

Configuration is done via nginx.conf , allowing users to enable various generic gateway capabilities (logging, rate limiting, compression, etc.) and custom modules. Nginx also supports multiple protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP/2, WebSocket, TCP, UDP) and can be scaled with multiple workers and a master process.

Finally, the article notes the single‑point‑of‑failure issue of a single Nginx instance and hints at cluster mode as a solution.