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Interesting how NGINX + Lua is becoming more and more widely used in mission critical applications with huge amount of traffic. Since the introduction of LuaJIT performances have been outstanding and many companies like Netflix, Alibaba, Cloudflare, Kong [0], Airbnb all run on a customized nginx with Lua modules; doing amazing things from security to API management.

[0] http://github.com/mashape/kong

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I predicted about a year ago that nginx/LuaJIT (OpenResty) is the sleeping giant of web development. I've seen more and more companies start using it, and I wouldn't be surprised if people start talking about it as a Node.js alternative in the not so distant future.

The good thing about NGINX is that it's perceived as language agnostic. So no matter what your codebase lang, you can always put an nginx on top. While Node tools, are only good if you use them within a Node stack (see Strongloop). As far as I know nginx is powering 150M websites/apps.

HAProxy will be using Lua in future releases for similar reasons. Interesting trend!

And Lua is taking off because of these reasons such as the ability to extend Nginx or HAproxy. Plus, is simple to use, easy to learn and highly efficient, without the need to touch C/C++.

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