For us at $day_job, consistency was also a nice bonus (we recently moved our web load balancers from Varnish to nginx plus, because now we have a single software package which does our SSL termination with HTTP/2, HTTP / TCP / UDP load balancing, serves static assets, caches, and is also the host for our application server itself, Passenger). Of course all of these functions happen across dozens of servers, but we get to use a single config syntax to make all of that happen and only need to track security issues, etc, for a single package.
Sure, we could accomplish all of that with some combination of haproxy and/or varnish and/or apache and/or nginx and/or various Ruby/Rack app servers... but we don't have to. Nginx does an acceptably good job of all of those things for our needs right now, and the support they provide for the license cost is pretty reasonable.
Sure, we could accomplish all of that with some combination of haproxy and/or varnish and/or apache and/or nginx and/or various Ruby/Rack app servers... but we don't have to. Nginx does an acceptably good job of all of those things for our needs right now, and the support they provide for the license cost is pretty reasonable.