Best of NginxJuly 2025

  1. 1
    Article
    Avatar of laraveldevLaravel Dev·46w

    Nginx vs Caddy Performance 😮

    A performance comparison between Nginx and Caddy web servers reveals surprising results that could impact server architecture decisions for PHP and Laravel applications. The benchmark results were unexpected and may influence how developers choose between these web servers for their projects.

  2. 2
    Article
    Avatar of systemdesignnewsSystem Design Newsletter·45w

    Forward Proxy vs Reverse Proxy ✨

    Forward proxies sit between clients and the internet, filtering requests and providing anonymity, while reverse proxies sit between the internet and servers, handling load balancing, security, and caching. Forward proxies require client configuration and are commonly used in corporate networks for access control, whereas reverse proxies are transparent to clients and provide server-side benefits like TLS termination, DDoS protection, and traffic distribution across multiple servers.

  3. 3
    Article
    Avatar of last9Last9·44w

    Monitor Nginx with OpenTelemetry Tracing

    Learn how to instrument NGINX with OpenTelemetry to capture distributed traces across your entire request path. The guide covers a 5-minute Docker setup using the official nginx:1.25-otel image, production configuration patterns with conditional sampling, and integration with the OpenTelemetry Collector. It includes performance benchmarks showing minimal overhead (0.8% CPU, 3MB memory), Kubernetes deployment patterns, and advanced techniques for correlating logs with traces. The setup enables end-to-end visibility from NGINX through backend services to databases, helping identify bottlenecks in seconds rather than hours.