Celebrating 20 Years of NGINX

In the early 2000s, an exciting journey began – one that would shape the fabric of the internet as we know it today. For those of us who have been using NGINX since its early days, it’s been incredible to witness how an open source tool originally created to solve the C10K problem has grown into a cornerstone of modern web infrastructure.

Today, October 4, 2024, marks 20 years since NGINX’s first public release. Why October 4th? In a nod to space exploration, NGINX founder Igor Sysoev used key dates of historic missions as the release milestones for his products. This is why you’ll see April 12th and October 4th as repeating themes in NGINX’s timeline.

In this post, we’ll take you through this history of NGINX, our projects and products, and take a look at where we are today. Let’s start by going back to a time, before the dawn of NGINX, to understand the origin story…

In the 1990s, Igor Sysoev became an established engineer in computer system programming. He built several products, including an antivirus tool, then switched to web engineering in the early 2000s. The original idea for NGINX first came about in 2002. At the time, Igor was working for a large internet company and began noticing that their Apache web servers were unable to handle very high numbers of connections. The internet was going through a phase of explosive growth and many systems struggled with the C10K problem – how to handle more than 10,000 concurrent connections.

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