I think people choose nginx because it does everything decently, even if it can't beat HAProxy for load-balancing or Varnish for caching (at least the FOSS ngin

I think people choose nginx because it does everything decently, even if it can't beat HAProxy for load-balancing or Varnish for caching (at least the FOSS nginx). I run a small-to-mmedium size application with multiple upstream (local web app tier, remote asset servers) and some basic vhost and caching use-cases, e.g. cache specific paths with different cache keys than others, different cache behaviours and life-times, request rate limiting, some local file serving. nginx does everything I need, without any additional modules. I get close enough to zero-downtime deployments by using multiple backends and proxy_next_upstream, haven't needed active healthchecks for the upstreams yet. I have JSON access logs, so my dashboard about vhost activity is in Kibana now. There are a few juicy features missing (cache PURGE, proxy request coalescing, extended stub status endpoint, JSON error log). Not trying to fanboy, but I wouldn't introduce additional complexity into my stack by running haproxy + varnish + nginx just to get the best of each tool, not at my current scale.