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Cowboy vs nginx: What are the differences?
Introduction: Cowboy and nginx are both popular web servers commonly used in the industry for hosting websites and web applications. However, they differ in various aspects that make them suitable for different use cases and scenarios.
Architecture: Cowboy is written in Erlang and known for its lightweight, low latency, and high throughput capabilities, making it ideal for real-time web applications. On the other hand, Nginx is a multi-threaded web server known for its scalability, reverse proxy, and caching features, making it suitable for serving static content and handling high traffic loads efficiently.
Configuration: Cowboy is highly configurable using Erlang code or configuration files, providing fine-grained control over its behavior and features. In contrast, Nginx uses a declarative configuration language that is more user-friendly and easier to set up, making it a preferred choice for beginners or those looking for simplicity in configuration.
SSL/TLS Support: Cowboy supports SSL/TLS encryption by default, allowing secure communication with clients over HTTPS. Nginx, on the other hand, offers robust SSL/TLS termination capabilities, making it suitable for terminating SSL/TLS connections and offloading encryption tasks from backend servers.
Module Ecosystem: Nginx has a vast ecosystem of third-party modules that extend its functionality, such as load balancing, caching, and authentication. Cowboy, on the contrary, has a more limited set of modules available, focusing more on providing core features for building real-time web applications.
Scalability: Nginx is renowned for its scalability and ability to handle thousands of concurrent connections efficiently, making it a preferred choice for high-traffic websites and applications. Cowboy, although efficient in handling real-time communication, may not scale as well as Nginx in scenarios requiring high concurrency and connection handling.
Web Application Support: Cowboy is specifically designed for building web applications with real-time communication capabilities, such as chat applications or live streaming services. Nginx, while capable of serving web applications, is more commonly used for static content delivery, reverse proxying, and load balancing in traditional web hosting setups.
In Summary, Cowboy and nginx differ in architecture, configuration, SSL/TLS support, module ecosystem, scalability, and web application support, making them suitable for different use cases based on specific requirements.
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!
I would pick nginx over both IIS and Apace HTTP Server any day. Combine it with docker, and as you grow maybe even traefik, and you'll have a really flexible solution for serving http content where you can take sites and projects up and down without effort, easily move it between systems and dont have to handle any dependencies on your actual local machine.
From a StackShare Community member: "We are a LAMP shop currently focused on improving web performance for our customers. We have made many front-end optimizations and now we are considering replacing Apache with nginx. I was wondering if others saw a noticeable performance gain or any other benefits by switching."
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.
I use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure
I use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works
For us, NGINX is a lite HTTP server easy to configure. On our research, we found a well-documented software we a lot of support from the community.
We have been using it alongside tools like certbot and it has been a total success.
We can easily configure our sites and have a folder for available vs enabled sites, and with the nginx -t command we can easily check everything is running fine.
- 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.
Pros of Cowboy
- Websockets integration8
- Cool name6
- Good to use with Erlang3
- Anime mascot2
Pros of NGINX
- High-performance http server1.4K
- Performance894
- Easy to configure730
- Open source607
- Load balancer530
- Free289
- Scalability288
- Web server226
- Simplicity175
- Easy setup136
- Content caching30
- Web Accelerator21
- Capability15
- Fast14
- High-latency12
- Predictability12
- Reverse Proxy8
- Supports http/27
- The best of them7
- Great Community5
- Lots of Modules5
- Enterprise version5
- High perfomance proxy server4
- Embedded Lua scripting3
- Streaming media delivery3
- Streaming media3
- Reversy Proxy3
- Blash2
- GRPC-Web2
- Lightweight2
- Fast and easy to set up2
- Slim2
- saltstack2
- Virtual hosting1
- Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast1
- Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior1
- Ingress controller1
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Cons of Cowboy
Cons of NGINX
- Advanced features require subscription10
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