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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.
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
- 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 Azure Websites
- Ease of deployment17
- Free plans for students6
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 Azure Websites
Cons of NGINX
- Advanced features require subscription10
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