Nginx is a reverse proxy, it can work as the load balancer, the static asset server, a response caching server, an authorization server, HLS streaming server, etc.

Nginx has a lot of usecases in one package, most larger companies and more technical workplaces, use Nginx or similar alternatives.

Nginx Unit typically is meant for unifying the entire application space of multiple programming languages served by 1 Server (which also acts as a static server)

So serving golang, python, php code and application all under 1 single wsgi/asgi application server called nginx unit and be able to dynamically change its routes with api calls too.

This allows you to have 1 root process in a docker container to control your python fastapi or golang api processes, without needing 1 container for nginx and 1 container for Python/Golang process or a supervisord like init system controlling 2 or more processes inside 1 container

Everything is under nginx unit and nginx unit is being triggered as the main process inside the container.

Moreover it is also much much much more faster in terms of response time than most language dependent application servers like gunicorn/unicorn for python3, etc [1]

[1](https://medium.com/@le_moment_it/nginx-unit-discover-and-ben...)

unit replaces gunicorn. It should also be much faster but you do your tests.