Docker vs NGINX Unit

Overview

Docker

Stacks194.2K

Followers143.8K

Votes3.9K

NGINX Unit

Stacks86

Followers199

Votes11

GitHub Stars5.6K

Forks365

Docker vs NGINX Unit: What are the differences?

Architecture: The key difference between Docker and NGINX Unit lies in their architecture. Docker follows a client-server architecture where a Docker client interacts with a Docker daemon running on the host machine. On the other hand, NGINX Unit is designed as a single binary with minimal dependencies, acting as both the runtime and web server, eliminating the need for a separate daemon or server.
Containerization: Docker primarily focuses on containerization, allowing users to package applications along with their dependencies into isolated containers. These containers can then be deployed and run on any system that supports Docker. Conversely, NGINX Unit is more flexible as it supports both containerized and non-containerized applications, allowing developers to deploy different types of workloads with ease.
Configuration: Docker uses a declarative approach to configure containers, where users define configuration files called Dockerfiles to build images and containerize applications. NGINX Unit, however, provides a dynamic and declarative configuration model, allowing developers to customize the runtime behavior and manage applications using a flexible JSON-based API, enabling real-time updates without restarting the server.
Supported Languages: Docker supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, allowing developers to build and run applications in different environments. NGINX Unit, on the other hand, has native support for multiple languages and runtimes, including PHP, Python, Go, and Ruby, making it easier to deploy and manage applications written in these languages without additional configuration.
Event-Driven Model: NGINX Unit employs an event-driven model, which enables it to handle a large number of concurrent connections efficiently. This makes it suitable for applications that require high performance and scalability, such as real-time communication or streaming applications. Docker, however, does not provide the same level of fine-grained control over event handling, as it focuses more on isolating and managing containers rather than optimizing for high-performance workloads.
Community and Ecosystem: Docker has a vast and active community, along with a rich ecosystem of pre-built container images and tools, making it easier for developers to find support and resources for their projects. NGINX Unit, being a newer technology, has a smaller community and ecosystem but is continuously growing, supported by NGINX, a well-established web server and load balancer.

In summary, Docker and NGINX Unit differ in their architecture, containerization approach, configuration models, supported languages, event-driven capabilities, and community/ecosystem size.

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Advice on Docker, NGINX Unit

Florian

IT DevOp at Agitos GmbH

Oct 22, 2019

Decided

lxd/lxc and Docker aren't congruent so this comparison needs a more detailed look; but in short I can say: the lxd-integrated administration of storage including zfs with its snapshot capabilities as well as the system container (multi-process) approach of lxc vs. the limited single-process container approach of Docker is the main reason I chose lxd over Docker.

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Detailed Comparison

Docker	NGINX Unit
The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere	NGINX Unit is a dynamic web application server, designed to run applications in multiple languages. Unit is lightweight, polyglot, and dynamically configured via API. The design of the server allows reconfiguration of specific application parameters as needed by the engineering or operations.
Integrated developer tools; open, portable images; shareable, reusable apps; framework-aware builds; standardized templates; multi-environment support; remote registry management; simple setup for Docker and Kubernetes; certified Kubernetes; application templates; enterprise controls; secure software supply chain; industry-leading container runtime; image scanning; access controls; image signing; caching and mirroring; image lifecycle; policy-based image promotion	Fully dynamic reconfiguration using RESTful JSON API;Multiple application languages and versions can run simultaneously;Dynamic application processes management (coming soon);TLS support (coming soon);TCP, HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP/2 routing and proxying (coming soon)
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 5.6K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 365
Stacks 194.2K	Stacks 86
Followers 143.8K	Followers 199
Votes 3.9K	Votes 11
Pros & Cons
Pros 823 Rapid integration and build up 692 Isolation 521 Open source 505 Testability and reproducibility 460 Lightweight Cons 8 New versions == broken features 6 Documentation not always in sync 6 Unreliable networking 4 Moves quickly 3 Not Secure	Pros 3 PHP 2 Multilang 2 Python 2 Golang 1 Node.js
Integrations
Java Docker Compose VirtualBox Linux Amazon EC2 Container Service Docker Swarm boot2docker Kubernetes Docker Machine Vagrant	Perl Python Golang PHP Ruby

What are some alternatives to Docker, NGINX Unit?

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

LXD

LXD isn't a rewrite of LXC, in fact it's building on top of LXC to provide a new, better user experience. Under the hood, LXD uses LXC through liblxc and its Go binding to create and manage the containers. It's basically an alternative to LXC's tools and distribution template system with the added features that come from being controllable over the network.

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

lighttpd

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Related Comparisons

Docker vs NGINX Unit: What are the differences?

Architecture: The key difference between Docker and NGINX Unit lies in their architecture. Docker follows a client-server architecture where a Docker client interacts with a Docker daemon running on the host machine. On the other hand, NGINX Unit is designed as a single binary with minimal dependencies, acting as both the runtime and web server, eliminating the need for a separate daemon or server.
Containerization: Docker primarily focuses on containerization, allowing users to package applications along with their dependencies into isolated containers. These containers can then be deployed and run on any system that supports Docker. Conversely, NGINX Unit is more flexible as it supports both containerized and non-containerized applications, allowing developers to deploy different types of workloads with ease.
Configuration: Docker uses a declarative approach to configure containers, where users define configuration files called Dockerfiles to build images and containerize applications. NGINX Unit, however, provides a dynamic and declarative configuration model, allowing developers to customize the runtime behavior and manage applications using a flexible JSON-based API, enabling real-time updates without restarting the server.
Supported Languages: Docker supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, allowing developers to build and run applications in different environments. NGINX Unit, on the other hand, has native support for multiple languages and runtimes, including PHP, Python, Go, and Ruby, making it easier to deploy and manage applications written in these languages without additional configuration.
Event-Driven Model: NGINX Unit employs an event-driven model, which enables it to handle a large number of concurrent connections efficiently. This makes it suitable for applications that require high performance and scalability, such as real-time communication or streaming applications. Docker, however, does not provide the same level of fine-grained control over event handling, as it focuses more on isolating and managing containers rather than optimizing for high-performance workloads.
Community and Ecosystem: Docker has a vast and active community, along with a rich ecosystem of pre-built container images and tools, making it easier for developers to find support and resources for their projects. NGINX Unit, being a newer technology, has a smaller community and ecosystem but is continuously growing, supported by NGINX, a well-established web server and load balancer.

In summary, Docker and NGINX Unit differ in their architecture, containerization approach, configuration models, supported languages, event-driven capabilities, and community/ecosystem size.

Docker vs NGINX Unit

Overview