Why Igor Sysoev’s Departure Marks a Turning Point for Nginx and the Web

On January 18, Nginx vice‑president Rob Whiteley posted a farewell letter announcing that Igor Sysoev, the author and co‑founder of Nginx Inc., is leaving both Nginx and its parent company F5 Networks.

The announcement quickly trended on Hacker News, where users praised Igor’s contributions and lamented the end of a “peak generation.”

“I have seen Igor at a conference say, ‘Hello, I am the creator of Nginx,’ and the audience erupts in applause. He even has to tell them, ‘Come on guys, you haven’t heard my talk yet.’”

Since its inception in 2002, Nginx has become the most popular web server worldwide. According to W3Techs, it held 33 % of the global web‑server market in early 2022, second only to Apache (31 %).

Developers widely respect Igor’s work; many describe his departure as the close of an era.

Igor’s original vision was to design a new architecture that could handle tens of thousands of concurrent connections and efficiently cache large media files. He released Nginx as open source on October 4 2004, and for seven years he was the sole developer, writing hundreds of thousands of lines of C code that turned Nginx from a simple web server into a versatile “Swiss‑army‑knife” for modern web applications.

In 2011 Igor co‑founded Nginx, Inc. with Maxim Konovalov and Andrew Alexeev to accelerate development and introduce commercial offerings while keeping the core product fully open source. The company was acquired by F5 Networks in March 2019 for $670 million, retaining the Nginx brand. The acquisition sparked a copyright dispute with Rambler Group, which sued Nginx Inc. for alleged ownership of the code. After a criminal case was dismissed, Rambler pursued a civil claim for $7.5 billion, which was eventually closed due to lack of criminal evidence.

“As an open‑source developer and founder of a commercial OSS startup, Nginx gave me the confidence to challenge the status quo. Apache is so revered that improving it seemed crazy, but Igor did it, and that truly impacted me.” – yesimahuman

Igor has emphasized balancing open‑source and commercial extensions: new features requested by paying customers are compared with community needs, and only those that benefit the broader user base are merged into the open‑source version.

Today Nginx powers billions of websites, underpins services such as Cloudflare, OpenResty, and Tengine, and continues to evolve with projects like njs (Nginx JavaScript) and Nginx Unit. Igor plans to focus on personal projects, while the Nginx team, led by Maxim Konovalov, carries forward his vision.