I never understood the appeal of Nginx. I mean, I understand the web server, it's much easier than setting up apache, and before apache introduced event based m

I never understood the appeal of Nginx. I mean, I understand the web server, it's much easier than setting up apache, and before apache introduced event based mpm it was also much faster. What I mean is the load balancing functionality of F5. It's in the same league as proxy support in apache[1]. Hardly comparable to for example what HAProxy provides, yet for some reason F5 (which is a leader in hardware load balancing, sadly though with public cloud that market is shrinking) found it interesting. Is it because of the name recognition, and they plan on turning Nginx into a proper load balancer? Because in terms of functionality Nginx is not even close to their LTM (even HAProxy is missing a lot of its features). [1] I'm talking about the non paid version, there are some health checks in paid although still the support is rather weak.