this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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Non-MS Web servers and services have evolved significantly since IIS was originally introduced. Back in the mid 90s when the web was growing up authentication was significantly more primitive. Active Directory didn't exist yet. OpenSSL didn't even exist. Linux as an accepted business server was much more rare. Your options for OS were Windows, IBM (AS400 or AIX), SCO Unix, Netware, AT&T or Berkley Unix, and a few others mainframe OSes.
Among other things, IIS allowed a way to leverage existing user directories for auth on top of an OS you already had deployed and supported in your org. It was a simple, primitive, horrible insecure and exciting time.
Dude, I learned how to write HTML in the 90's and even back then everyone knew that apache2 was clearly fucking superior. IIS has been a joke since the 90's when it was released.
Except that's not what was happening. IIS came after Apache and played a catch up for a while. It almost surpassed Apache in 2007, but GFC happened and its popularity dropped rapidly. If not for GFC, there would be no Apache today.
Nginx also increased in popularity around that time, giving more competition to IIS. Most of the web stacks I've seen recently are running Nginx.
(I'm an HAProxy man myself.)
NGINX is rarely used as a web server, it's usually used as a reverse proxy, cache and SSL terminator. Just like HAProxy, Varnish, etc.
How are we defining a web server? Because to me it's "the thing listening on Port 80 or 443 that responds to HTTP requests."
And, yes, I know they do more than that, but they also do those things quite a bit.
There's a pretty clear distinction between a web server and a reverse proxy if you work in the field.
I've got over 20 years of experience in the field. I've configured both of them as reverse proxies and web servers.
If Nginx is accepting connections on ports 80 and 443, terminating SSL, and responding to HTTP requests, that makes it a web server. Especially if it's responding with static content.
Oh my...