Azure Websites vs nginx

Overview

NGINX

Stacks115.0K

Followers61.9K

Votes5.5K

GitHub Stars28.4K

Forks7.6K

Azure Websites

Stacks404

Followers404

Votes23

Azure Websites vs nginx: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Azure Websites and NGINX

Azure Websites and NGINX are both popular choices for hosting websites, but they have several key differences that set them apart.

1. Scalability and Elasticity: Azure Websites is built on the Azure Cloud platform and offers automatic scalability and elasticity. It can handle high traffic loads and can automatically scale up or down based on demand. On the other hand, NGINX is a lightweight web server that can also handle high loads, but it requires manual configuration to scale and handle increased traffic.

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS) vs. Web Server: Azure Websites is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, which means that it provides a fully managed hosting environment where developers can focus on the application logic without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. NGINX, on the other hand, is a web server software that needs to be installed and configured on a server or virtual machine.

3. Integrated Services: Azure Websites offers integration with other Azure services such as Azure SQL Database, Azure Storage, and Azure Cache for Redis. This allows developers to easily build and deploy applications that leverage these services. NGINX is a standalone web server and does not provide these integrated services.

4. Deployment and Continuous Integration/Deployment (CI/CD): Azure Websites offers seamless deployment and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) capabilities. It integrates well with popular source control systems like GitHub, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps, allowing for automated deployment workflows. NGINX, being a web server, does not provide these deployment and CI/CD features out of the box.

5. Operating System and Programming Language Support: Azure Websites supports multiple programming languages, including .NET, Node.js, Java, PHP, and Python, and runs on Windows or Linux-based operating systems. NGINX is agnostic to programming languages and operating systems, but it is commonly used with Linux-based systems and supports various programming languages.

6. High Availability and Fault Tolerance: Azure Websites offers built-in high availability and fault tolerance by replicating applications across multiple regions and automatically handling failover in case of disruptions. NGINX can also be configured for high availability, but it requires manual setup and configuration to achieve fault tolerance.

In Summary, Azure Websites is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering on the Azure Cloud platform that provides automatic scalability, integrated services, deployment capabilities, and high availability. NGINX, on the other hand, is a standalone web server software that requires manual configuration for scaling, deployment, and fault tolerance.

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Advice on NGINX, Azure Websites

greg00m

Mar 9, 2020

Needs advice

I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities.
Ready, aim fire!

766k views766k

Comments

Grant

Developer at GMS LLC

Sep 5, 2020

Decided

Server rendered HTML output from PHP is being migrated to the client as Vue.js components, future plans to provide additional content, and other new miscellaneous features all result in a substantial increase of static files needing to be served from the server. NGINX has better performance than Apache for serving static content.
The change to NGINX will require switching from PHP to PHP-FPM resulting in a distributed architecture with a higher complexity configuration, but this is outweighed by PHP-FPM being faster than PHP for processing requests.
The NGINX + PHP-FPM setup now allows for horizontally scaling of resources rather vertically scaling the previously combined Apache + PHP resources.
PHP shell tasks can now efficiently be decoupled from the application reducing main application footprint and allow for scaling of tasks on an individual basis.

429k views429k

Comments

jlp78

May 31, 2019

Reviewon

NGINX

I use nginx because it is very light weight. Where Apache tries to include everything in the web server, nginx opts to have external programs/facilities take care of that so the web server can focus on efficiently serving web pages. While this can seem inefficient, it limits the number of new bugs found in the web server, which is the element that faces the client most directly.

727k views727k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

NGINX	Azure Websites
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.	Azure Websites is a fully managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that enables you to build, deploy and scale enterprise-grade web Apps in seconds. Focus on your application code, and let Azure take care of the infrastructure to scale and securely run it for you.
-	.NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, Python;Built-in AutoScale and Load Balancing;High Availability with Auto-Patching;Continuous Deployment with Git, TFS, GitHub;SQL Databases, MySQL, DocumentDB, Search, MongoDB;WordPress, Umbraco, Joomla, Drupal
Statistics
GitHub Stars 28.4K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 115.0K	Stacks 404
Followers 61.9K	Followers 404
Votes 5.5K	Votes 23
Pros & Cons
Pros 1453 High-performance http server 895 Performance 730 Easy to configure 607 Open source 530 Load balancer Cons 10 Advanced features require subscription	Pros 17 Ease of deployment 6 Free plans for students

What are some alternatives to NGINX, Azure Websites?

Heroku

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Google App Engine

Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Related Comparisons

Azure Websites vs nginx: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Azure Websites and NGINX

Azure Websites and NGINX are both popular choices for hosting websites, but they have several key differences that set them apart.

Azure Websites vs nginx

Overview

Azure Websites vs nginx: What are the differences?