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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Interesting.

Most of the stuff I've done for reverse proxies has been pretty straightforward and just using the stuff built into Nginx, but I have to admit that it wouldn't have even occurred to me to use FastCGI if I needed something more elaborate.

I used FastCGI a bit about ten years ago to "convert" some C++ code I wrote to work on the web, but admittedly I haven't used it much since then.

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Also, embedded servers are now much much much more popular. Stuff an HTTP server directly into your application and do whatever you gotta do without gateways.

That is way! Unfortunately, sometimes you have to do path-based routing to different backends, and now you're back to needing a proxy between your clients and your applications.

This is the way only if you're operating in a trusted environment (eg. homelab, intranet) or you're sticking CloudFlare or some other "reverse proxy as a service" in front of it. If you expose an embedded HTTP app server directly to the Internet you're almost guaranteed to get pwned, as the Internet has now become an extremely hostile place.

Go's embedded HTTP server can handle it just fine: https://blog.gopheracademy.com/advent-2016/exposing-go-on-th...

These are often not enough ‘battle-tested” and come with a warning to never expose to public internet. So then you put a WAF in front of it, and you are back to HTTP reverse proxy setup.

I've always chuckled at this. Just don't used bad HTTP server libraries. I wouldn't put something like that on my intranet either.

But even if you disagree with me the point is that I can count on only one hand the number of times I went "oh man, I need a FastCGI middle end".

I agree with your point but this is the reality:

F.E. Python stdlib http.server comes with a warning: Warning http.server is not recommended for production. It only implements basic security checks.

The `standard` way is then to use WSGI or ASGI, not FastCGI, but it is similar interface implementation.

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