Application health checks mostly; though we were using it in a caching server context (static files and non-whitelisted endpoints served directly from Apache vs

Application health checks mostly; though we were using it in a caching server context (static files and non-whitelisted endpoints served directly from Apache vs. hitting the app servers). They're available in Nginx Plus, just not the free version. Again, the pricing wasn't the issue; it was the fact we would have had to go through procurement - which involves a few weeks/months of process at any decently large company. So we ended up using Apache because the team was familiar with it and knew it could support our use case. While Nginx probably would have performed better, in the end it was just easier to use Apache because it was a mature Open Source project and throw a few extra VMs at the caching tier to make up for the performance gap.