Why Igor Sysoev’s Departure Marks a New Era for NGINX and Web Servers

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

According to the NGINX blog, Igor began developing NGINX in the spring of 2002 when Apache HTTP Server dominated the market. Observing the rapid growth of the Internet, he realized Apache’s connection handling could not scale, 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 started using NGINX, Igor officially released it as open source on October 4, 2004.

For the next seven years he single‑handedly maintained and expanded NGINX, writing hundreds of thousands of lines of code. The project grew from a simple web server and reverse proxy into a versatile “Swiss‑army‑knife” for web applications, adding load balancing, caching, security, and content acceleration features, quickly gaining market share.

In 2011 Igor co‑founded NGINX, Inc. with Maxim Konovalov and Andrew Alexeev, offering commercial services. The company’s approach of adding proprietary modules to the commercial version was novel at the time and is now common among open‑source startups.

Since its founding, NGINX has released over 140 versions. Igor also oversaw the rapid development of related projects such as NGINX JavaScript (njs) and NGINX Unit, and designed a new system call sendfile(2) that was integrated into the FreeBSD operating system.

On March 11, 2019, F5 acquired NGINX for $670 million. By the end of 2019, NGINX supported more than 475 million websites, and by 2021 it became the most widely used web server worldwide.

Article originally published by OSC Open Source Community (© original author).