Igor Sysoev is a Russian software engineer who created Nginx. His work on high-performance web serving changed how the internet handles traffic and challenged decades-old assumptions about web server architecture.
Background
Sysoev worked as a system administrator at Rambler, a large Russian internet company. Frustrated by Apache’s inability to handle Rambler’s growing traffic, he began developing Nginx in 2002.
Solving C10K
The “C10K problem”—handling 10,000 concurrent connections—was unsolved by traditional web servers. Apache created a process or thread per connection, consuming resources that limited scalability. Sysoev designed Nginx to use event-driven, non-blocking I/O.
Open Source Release
Nginx was released publicly in 2004 under a BSD-like license. Its performance advantages led to rapid adoption, particularly for high-traffic sites and as a reverse proxy.
Nginx Inc.
In 2011, Sysoev co-founded Nginx Inc. to provide commercial support and enterprise features. The company was acquired by F5 Networks in 2019 for $670 million.
Impact
Nginx demonstrated that questioning fundamental architectural decisions could yield dramatic improvements. Its event-driven model influenced web server design and became standard for modern web infrastructure.