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  5. Kestrel vs nginx

Kestrel vs nginx

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

NGINX
NGINX
Stacks115.0K
Followers61.9K
Votes5.5K
GitHub Stars28.4K
Forks7.6K
Kestrel
Kestrel
Stacks37
Followers58
Votes0

Kestrel vs nginx: What are the differences?

Kestrel is a lightweight, cross-platform web server developed by Microsoft, while nginx is a powerful, open-source web server and reverse proxy known for its high performance and scalability. Let's explore the key differences between them.

  1. Technology Stack: Kestrel is specifically designed for hosting ASP.NET Core applications, whereas nginx supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks.

  2. Performance: nginx is renowned for its high performance and efficiency, making it suitable for handling large volumes of traffic and concurrent connections, while Kestrel may require additional configurations or optimizations for similar workloads.

  3. Scalability: nginx excels in horizontal scalability and load balancing, allowing it to distribute incoming requests across multiple servers seamlessly, while Kestrel may require additional infrastructure or load balancing solutions to achieve similar scalability.

  4. Features: nginx offers a rich set of features, including caching, SSL termination, and content compression, making it suitable for a variety of use cases beyond basic web serving, whereas Kestrel focuses more on serving ASP.NET Core applications with minimal overhead.

  5. Configuration: nginx provides a flexible configuration system with support for complex routing rules, access controls, and server configurations via configuration files, while Kestrel offers simpler configuration options, often integrated within ASP.NET Core projects.

  6. Community and Support: nginx benefits from a large and active community of users and contributors, providing extensive documentation, third-party modules, and support resources, while Kestrel's community may be relatively smaller, with fewer resources and community-contributed extensions available.

In summary, Kestrel is a lightweight, cross-platform web server optimized for high performance and designed for hosting .NET applications, while nginx is a versatile and scalable web server renowned for its load balancing, caching abilities, and extensive ecosystem of third-party modules.

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Advice on NGINX, Kestrel

greg00m
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
jlp78
jlp78

May 31, 2019

ReviewonNGINXNGINX

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
StackShare
StackShare

May 29, 2019

Needs advice

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."

725k views725k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

NGINX
NGINX
Kestrel
Kestrel

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.

Kestrel is based on Blaine Cook's "starling" simple, distributed message queue, with added features and bulletproofing, as well as the scalability offered by actors and the JVM.

-
Written by Robey Pointer;Starling clone written in Scala (a port of Starling from Ruby to Scala);Queues are stored in memory, but logged on disk
Statistics
GitHub Stars
28.4K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
7.6K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
115.0K
Stacks
37
Followers
61.9K
Followers
58
Votes
5.5K
Votes
0
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
No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to NGINX, Kestrel?

Apache HTTP Server

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.

Kafka

Kafka

Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.

Unicorn

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.

Celery

Celery

Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.

Microsoft IIS

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

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

Passenger

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.

Amazon SQS

Amazon SQS

Transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available. With SQS, you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available messaging cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

NSQ

NSQ

NSQ is a realtime distributed messaging platform designed to operate at scale, handling billions of messages per day. It promotes distributed and decentralized topologies without single points of failure, enabling fault tolerance and high availability coupled with a reliable message delivery guarantee. See features & guarantees.

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