How Igor Sysoev Built NGINX: From Solo Project to World’s Leading Web Server

NGINX announced that its founder Igor Sysoev is leaving both NGINX and F5, stating he wants to spend more time with family, friends, and personal projects, and thanking him for improving websites worldwide.

In the spring of 2002 Igor Sysoev began developing NGINX after observing that Apache HTTP Server could not scale to the rapidly growing Internet traffic, prompting him to design a new architecture capable of handling tens of thousands of concurrent connections and caching heavy content such as images and videos.

After several Russian and foreign companies adopted the software, Igor publicly released NGINX as open‑source on 4 October 2004.

For the next seven years he single‑handedly maintained and expanded NGINX, writing hundreds of thousands of lines of code and adding core features such as load balancing, caching, security, and content acceleration, turning it into a “Swiss‑army‑knife” for web applications and services.

In 2011 Igor co‑founded NGINX, Inc. with Maxim Konovalov and Andrew Alexeev, offering commercial services and introducing proprietary modules—a model later adopted by many open‑source startups.

Since its founding the company has released over 140 versions of the open‑source product and overseen related projects like NGINX JavaScript (njs) and NGINX Unit. Igor also designed a new sendfile(2) system‑call implementation that was integrated into the FreeBSD operating system.

From left: Igor Sysoev, CEO Gus Robertson, co‑founders Andrew Alexeev and Maxim Konovalov.

On 11 March 2019 F5 acquired NGINX for US$670 million.

By the end of 2019 NGINX served more than 475 million websites, and by 2021 it became the world’s most widely used web server.