NGINX Unit Cookbook

Chapter 1. Unit Introduction and Features

Introduction

This chapter will introduce you to NGINX Unit in a traditional book format before switching to the O’Reilly Cookbook format in Chapter 2. Throughout this chapter you will learn about what makes Unit different from other middleware application servers. Before learning the how, you’ll learn the why, with a brief history of the problem Unit aims to solve. From that understanding, the architecture of NGINX Unit will be introduced, followed by the language support, and finally the API that drives the configuration.

Application Landscape and Unit Project History

The landscape of web applications has changed. In the past, applications were written from the ground up to serve specific needs, and upgrades were seldom issued compared to the present day. Today, applications are released frequently, in piecemeal fashion, and portions are completely rewritten over time. As teams and web application offerings grow, the likelihood of the logic being diverse in both language and code base grows as well.

As web applications diversify through microservices, languages, and language versions, so does the operational complexity of managing middleware, where middleware is defined as the application server that receives requests and ushers them to the application code. Installing, configuring, tuning, and maintaining multiple types of middleware servers for different types of application languages and versions requires a lot of work, expertise, ...