Do Svidaniya pays tribute to Igor, the founder of NGINX, NGINX

It is with great gratitude and regret that we announce that the authors of NGINX and NGINX, Inc. Co-founder Igor has opted out of NGINX and F5 to spend more time with his family and friends and explore personal projects.

In the spring of 2002, Igor Sysoev began developing NGINX. Observing the rapid growth of the Internet in its early days, he devised a way to better handle web traffic. This unique and innovative architecture enables high-traffic sites to more easily handle thousands of concurrent connections and cache rich media content such as photos or videos that affect the speed of page loading.

In the space of 20 years, the code developed by Igor has become an important cornerstone of most websites on the planet — either directly supporting them or as the software underlayer for popular servers like Cloudflare, OpenResty or Tengine.

In fact, it’s not hard to see Igor’s vision as one of the key factors that created the current state of the Web. Guided by Igor’s pioneering spirit and correct values, NGINX, Inc. Came into being. Supported by open source and the community, NGINX, Inc. fosters a commitment to code excellence and transparency while building commercial products that customers love.

Balancing the two is not easy. Igor is open-minded and eager to learn, and has a strong commitment to developing great software. The respect he has received from the community, developers, enterprise customers, and NGINX engineers is a testament to his leadership.

Introduction to Igor and NGINX

Igor was born in a small town in Kazakhstan, the former Soviet Republic, the son of an army officer. He moved with his family to the capital, Almaty, when he was one. Igor has been a computer nerd since childhood. In the mid-1980s, while still in high school, he wrote his first line of code on the Yamaha MSX. Igor has since graduated from the prestigious Baumann State Technical University in Moscow with a degree in computer science. That’s when the early forms of the Internet began to take shape.

Igor’s first job was as a systems administrator, but he also wrote code on the side. In 1999, he released an anti-virus program, his first assembly language program that protected against the 10 most common computer viruses of the time. Igor freely shared binaries of the antivirus program, which has been widely used in Russia for several years. He realized that the connection handling of the early Apache HTTP server couldn’t scale to meet the evolving demands of the World Wide Web, so he started working on the open-source software that would come to be known as NGINX.

To solve the C10k problem (handling 10,000 concurrent connections on one server), Igor built a Web server that could not only handle a large number of concurrent connections, but also handle bandwidth-hogging elements like photos or music files more quickly and efficiently. After NGINX was embraced and adopted by several companies both at home and abroad, Igor opened the project to open source and under a loose license on October 4, 2004, the 47th anniversary of the Launch of Sputnik, the world’s first satellite.

Igor was the sole developer of NGINX code for seven years. In that time, he wrote hundreds of thousands of lines of code and single-handedly transformed NGINX from a Web server and reverse proxy into a truly versatile tool for Web applications and services by adding key features such as load balancing, caching, security and content acceleration.

Despite Igor’s complete lack of project evangelism and relatively limited project documentation, NGINX quickly gained market share. Even without a manual, NGINX still works well and is building a reputation. More and more developers and system administrators are using NGINX to solve problems and speed up their websites. Without praise or publicity, code is the best synonym for Igor.

NGINX remains open source while being commercialized

To speed up development, Igor formed NGINX, Inc. in 2011 with co-founders Maxim Konovalov and Andrew Alexeev. Commercial companies. While Igor understands that he and his team need to make a commercial profit in order to keep the company going, they are committed to maintaining the integrity of the open source version of NGINX and continue to provide lenient licenses.

True to his word, Igor has led NGINX to improve its open source products since the company was founded, releasing more than 140 updates to date. Today’s NGINX software powers hundreds of millions of websites.

Igor, CEO Gus Robertson, co-founders Andrew Alexeev, and Maxim Konovalov are pictured during a venture capital fundraiser for NGINX, Inc. (right to left)

Back in 2011, the idea of “adding functionality to the commercial version in the form of proprietary modules” was a novel one; Today, countless open source startups are following this path. In 2013, the commercial version of NGINX Plus was launched to a rapturous reception. Four years later, NGINX has more than 1,000 paying customers, generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Meanwhile, the NGINX open Source edition and the NGINX community continue to thrive. As of the end of 2019, NGINX supported more than 475 million websites. By 2021, NGINX was the most widely used Web server in the world.

Igor has always had an eye on the future, leading NGINX JavaScript(NJS) and other popular NGINX projects such as the NGINX Unit to rapid growth. He also built a new implementation for the SendFile (2) system call and integrated it into the open source FreeBSD operating system. Even as the company merged with F5 and the engineering team grew, Igor remained a pillar of the company behind the scenes, his vision and guidance helped keep NGINX moving in the right direction.

Pass on Igor’s excellent quality

Today, Igor is honorably retired, but his spirit and the culture he created will live on. For great companies, products, and projects, the DNA of the founders is deeply ingrained. Igor has shaped our vision for product, community, transparency, open source, and innovation. Under the leadership of Maxim and NGINX, we will continue to pursue our dream.

Igor’s greatest legacy for NGINX and F5 is of course the code itself. Much of the code Igor wrote is still in use today. Time will tell if we can continue to write immortal code and develop useful and widely respected products like Igor. This is a high bar, but Igor has laid a solid foundation for us to achieve this ambition. Igor, thank you for your guidance and company over the years and wish you all the best in the next chapter of your life.

More resources

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