$ 3M investment in NGINX

Today, Runa Capital has invested in the NGINX web server. In total, NGINX attracted investments of $ 3 million, in addition to Runa Capital, the world's largest funds BV Capital and MSD Capital, a private investment company Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Inc., participated in this round.

This is the largest Russian technological project. There is not a single software product made in Russia that is used by so many people. NGINX supports 43 million websites worldwide, only the Kalashnikov assault rifle (100 million copies) and Dostoevsky (80 million books) are more popular. Simply put, it is about the fact that NGINX today defines the image of Russia in the world, to the same extent that the United States is with Microsoft products.
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NGINX embodies the mission: to help talented Russian teams to scale their technology internationally. In a short time NGINX has become the third most popular web server, now we are faced with a large-scale, but quite realistic goal - to surpass the Microsoft web server in this market, and in the future Apache.

But these are not all the reasons why we consider this transaction to be the most important in our history. Understand the prospects NGINX can, if you look into the near future. About ten or fifteen years old.

But before heading into the future, let's see what we know about NGINX.


Igor clearly knows what the future will be. (photo from Jekel )

NGINX is an open source web server created by Igor Sysoev in 2004. Igor worked with high-load systems and clearly understood the futility of using existing servers in the future. Apache and Microsoft servers were written ten years ago and morally obsolete. Their architecture executed each request in a separate process, and the processes themselves were processed in parallel. Naturally, when creating the process, all the resources he needed were reserved. Convenient, simple and reliable system. But on high-load systems, such a model reserved more resources than actually used them.

About how the New York firefighters beginning of the XIX century. All the brigades were private, and only one received money to extinguish the fire. Therefore, the firefighters are more willing to take lovers of fist fights than fighters with fire.


Benjamin Franklin was an avid firefighter.

In 2002, Sysoev decided to write his server with event-oriented architecture and the latest technologies. The server must also be open source and distributed freely. Now the server had only a couple of processes, and millions of requests were processed sequentially, in small pieces (multiplexing), taking up only those resources that they needed. No more downtime and process management costs. The server was engaged only in useful work and did not spend its strength and memory on costs. Thanks to a well-thought-out architecture, fast error correction, and great configurability, NGINX has confidently supplanted competing Lighttpd and Mathopd servers from the market.

By October 2011, the results are as follows: NGINX is the third server in the world, with 43 million servers running on it and 20% of the top 10,000 sites. These include Groupon, Vkontakte, Yandex, LivingSocial, Hulu, Twitpic, TechCrunch, Dropbox and WordPress. Each month, 5 million servers are added to their number. The market share is 8.5%; every month it grows by 0.5%. At the same time, not only NGINX grows like bamboo, the share of other servers steadily decreases by the same 0.5%.


Data from the October Netcraft report .

How to find out what will happen next and what is the reason for such a rush? Can I look into the future? In general, scientists hide it, but they have already had a working time machine for a long time. She is certainly expensive, but to collect it under the force and diligent student. We use it at Runa Capital all the time. Only we call it the “Historical analogy”: ask it a question, it finds a suitable example from history and shows you how events will develop in the smallest detail. You will see through the walls.

In the comments to the previous post mesouh was outraged:

Venture business is a business of high-risk investments, and, accordingly, the potential return should also be adequately high. Far from any technology can provide such a return, but only one that changes the entire economic system, or at least a part of it. Aircraft, automotive, personal computer business have already passed this stage. Now they are in a cluster of well-established technologies, low-risk, but low-income. So, I do not claim that the Internet will disappear. I affirm that the Internet is moving to the same cluster where the printing and aircraft building technologies are located.

The comment is sound, and we fully agree with him, the current stage of the Internet has come to an end, and we are at the turn of a new stage. Looking at the airplanes and cars of the first decade of the 20th century, one cannot but agree - they reached a certain dead end, optimal forms were found - wheels, chassis, engine layout, but it was impossible to make them a commercially attractive project.


Typical model 1915-2011.

Computers and the Internet are now, in the first decade of the 21st century, “hot technology,” so time on the Internet is going at a breakneck pace. This process will sooner or later reach a plateau, but the end is not yet visible. For cars, the period 1900-1925 is equal to the period 1925-2011 and even more. This does not mean that the first twenty-five years were "childhood." On the contrary, it was a period when everything was created: conveyors, the main type of car, the system of roads, gas stations, garages and workshops, the social group of drivers and private owners, taxis, and most importantly, the very concept of "car company" and "car market". During this period, in five years, people could climb from a small workshop to a giant factory.

The computer revolution is a much more powerful breakthrough, it will take half a century and will end with the production of anthropomorphic robots. If you take cars, while we are somewhere in 1910. But in terms of the usual pace of the automotive era, 70 years have passed.


How many of these machines will buy in the world?

They also tried to put an end to cars in the early 1910s — expensive, unprofitable, buying units, no investments. Each car must be assembled by hand, workers must perform a lot of complex operations, they need to pay dearly for it, and they get tired quickly. Such a workshop, at best, produced one car every two to three months.

That all changed in 1913, when Ford made a simple decision - no need to control what you can not control. He moved his attention from the machine (object) to the assembly stages (events), the workers no longer collected the machines, each of them performed only one simple action. It was necessary to fasten the transmission shaft to the engine, and the next shaft and engine appeared in front of the worker. The chassis was simply dragged on a rope through the shop from one worker to another, until a ready car sprang up on it. So the conveyor was born. The point is not that he accelerated the assembly twice, made it cheaper and eliminated the costs. The conveyor changed the main thing - now the plant produced a new car every 10 minutes.


This car will buy 15 million people.

In fact, France first established the serial production of cars in 1904. Hence the international terms: "sedan", "limousine", "garage". But in 1913, American management turned the tide. In 1924, the United States produced already 3,800,000 cars, and the rest of the world ... 380,000.

The “Ford Pipeline” of the Internet will run on NGINX. The Internet is only 17 years old, and it has become a domestic phenomenon only 10 years ago. Facebook is 7 years old, Youtube is 6, Habrahabr is 5. This is a child's age. But today one can clearly see the direction in which the network will develop - these are blogs, social networks, mass services and massive online games.

As soon as these clusters unite into one super-massive “social network”, we will see the real Internet. In the meantime, we face the first attempts to use Internet technologies, the euphoria of the success of Facebook and Wikipedia is the joy of the first flight of the Wright brothers and the first film of the Lumiere brothers. But investments are wiser to invest in Boeing and Hollywood.



So from the 1960s, they saw a personal computer in 1981 and a television in 2000. In general, it seems. But who is now, what will be the Internet in 2028?