The son of a military officer, he was born in a small town in Kazakhstan (then a Soviet republic). That Igor is held in such high esteem by community and developers, enterprise customers, and NGINX engineers is a testament to his leadership by example with humility, curiosity, and an insistence on making great software. Igor’s vision and values then shaped the company NGINX, Inc., fostering a commitment to code excellence and transparency powered by open source and community, while simultaneously creating commercial products that customers loved. In fact, one could easily argue that Igor’s vision is a key part of what makes the web what it is today.
He watched the meteoric growth of the early Internet and envisioned a better way to handle web traffic, a novel architecture that would allow high‑traffic sites to better handle tens of thousands of concurrent connections and cache rich content such as photos or videos that was slowing down page loads.įast forward 20 years, and the code that Igor created now powers the majority of websites running on the planet – both directly and as the software underlying popular servers like Cloudflare, OpenResty, and Tengine. Igor began developing NGINX in the spring of 2002.
With profound appreciation and gratitude, we announce today that Igor Sysoev – author of NGINX and co‑founder of NGINX, Inc. – has chosen to step back from NGINX and F5 in order to spend more time with his friends and family and to pursue personal projects.