What is the purpose of NGINX and Gunicorn running in parallel?
A lot of Django app deployments over Amazon's EC2 use HTTP servers NGINX and Gunicorn. I was wondering what they actually do and why both are used in parallel. What is the purpose of running them both in parallel? They aren't used in parallel. NGINX is a reverse proxy . It's first in line. It accepts incoming connections and decides where they should go next. It also (usually) serves static media such as CSS, JS and images. It can also do other things such as encryption via SSL, caching etc. Gunicorn is the next layer and is an application server . NGINX sees that the incoming connection is