NGINX founder Igor Sysoev quits F5! 20 years of development "brief history" is awe-inspiring

On January 18, the high-performance HTTP server NGINX officially released an article titled "Do Svidaniya, Igor, and Thank You for NGINX", officially announcing the news of NGINX founder Igor Sysoev's withdrawal from NGINX and F5.

It is understood that NGINX Inc. was acquired by F5 Networks for US$670 million in March 2019. The current NGINX belongs to a business unit of F5, mainly dedicated to open source projects and multi-cloud commercial products. As one of the co-founders of NGINX, Igor's departure this time also hopes to spend more time taking care of family and personal projects.

In this official NGINX article, they thank Igor for his contributions to the NGINX community:

“With profound appreciation and gratitude, we announce today that Igor Sysoev – author of NGINX and co‑founder of NGINX, Inc. – has chosen to step back from NGINX and F5 in order to spend more time with his friends and family and to pursue personal projects.”

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At the same time, the article also describes the growth of Igor and how to develop and build NGINX. It also gives us a deeper understanding of the "brief history" of the development of Igor and NGINX in the past 20 years. In awe.

"A Brief History" of the Birth of Genius Developers Igor and NGINX

Igor was born into a military family in Kazakhstan, the former Soviet Union, and his family relocated to the capital, Almaty, when he was 1 year old. Igor has been fascinated by computers since he was a child, before the Internet.

As a high school student in the mid-1980s, Igor wrote his first lines of code on the Yamaha MSX.

In the following years, Igor graduated from the prestigious Bauman Moscow State Technical University with a degree in Computer Science. At this time, the early form of the Internet is taking shape.

In the days after graduation, Igor started working as a system administrator while continuing to write code. In 1999, Igor finally released his first assembly language program, AV antivirus, which protected the 10 most common computer viruses at the time.

Afterwards, Igor also shared the binary of the program for free, which has since been widely used in the country at the time for several years.

In 2001, Igor Sysoev discovered a problem in his work: The way the original Apache HTTP server handled connections could not keep up with the increasing number of requests (this challenge was known at the time as the C10K problem - handling 10,000 concurrent clients client connections), which caught his attention and started working on the prototype of NGINX.

In the spring of 2002, Igor Sysoev started working on NGINX. In July 2011, Igor Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov co-founded NGINX INC. to provide commercial products and support for the software.

After several companies in Russia and abroad started using NGINX, Igor officially released the project's license on October 4, 2004.

For the next seven years, Igor was the sole developer of the NGINX code. During this time, he has written 100,000 lines of code and has grown NGINX from a web server and reverse proxy to a benchmark in web applications and services, also adding keys for load balancing, caching, security, and content acceleration Features.

Since 2012, Igor has stepped away from regular coding and started major work on the codebase, including Maxim Dunin, Valentin Bartenov, and Roman Harutyunyan.

Without Igor spending any time promoting it, the NGINX project quickly gained a huge market share. Even if a manual is lost, NGINX still works and spreads information, and its many advantages are attracting more and more developers and system administrators.

Inspired by Unix and other classic distributed systems, the event-driven architecture developed by Igor remains at the heart of NGINX today due to its lightweight, extensible, and powerful capabilities. Today, NGINX powers hundreds of millions of websites.

In the past 2021, according to W3Techs data, NGINX's global web server market share has reached 33%, while Apache ranks second with 31%.

Outstanding creators earn high respect from the NGINX community

I remember a video circulating on the Internet before. In the video, Igor was giving a speech at a conference. When he just said "Hello, I am Igor Sysoev, the creator of NGINX", the audience was already Prolonged applause broke out. This situation caused Igor to cry and laugh: "Big guy, you haven't started listening to my speech yet."

It can be seen that Igor has earned high respect from the community and developers, enterprise customers, and NGINX engineers, which once again confirms his leadership of humility, curiosity, and persistence in making great software.

As the official NGINX message to Igor: "Today we parted ways, and Igor finally has a well-deserved rest. Fortunately, his spirit and the culture he created will live on."

We also believe that Igor's achievements from the past to the present and his contribution to the Internet today do not need more praise. His influence, self-evident, salute him!