We currently serve most of our Rails and LAMP apps over Apache and Apache passenger, but we're considering adding Nginx or Varnish as a reverse proxy to reduce the load on our servers somewhat.
I'm aware that you can use Varnish and Nginx together, but given that there's investment of time in learning how both work, and where possible we want to keep the number of 'moving parts' in our infrastructure as low as possible, I'm trying to work out what the advantages and disadvantages are between using:
- nginx by itself as a the reverse reverse proxy/cache
- varnish alone as the reverse proxy/cache
- nginx and varnish together
I understand nginx is known to be extremely fast, and it's gaining prominence as a full blown http server as it gets more popular, so I can see the argument for investing some time in learning how this server works, but Varnish is still an unknown to me.
Why would I use Varnish if nCache is now in Nginx?
Thanks