How Cloudflare’s Pingora Uses Rust to Replace NGINX: A Game-Changer for Web Performance

Introduction: Why Cloudflare Needed a Better Proxy Solution

For years, NGINX has been the backbone of high-performance web servers and reverse proxy systems. It powers millions of websites, handling load balancing, caching, and traffic routing efficiently. However, as Cloudflare scaled to serve over 20% of the web’s traffic, it started facing serious challenges with NGINX, prompting the need for a modern, secure, and scalable proxy solution.

Enter Pingora, a Rust-based proxy infrastructure built from scratch by Cloudflare to replace NGINX. With Rust’s memory safety, concurrency, and performance optimizations, Pingora aims to enhance security, reduce latency, and improve efficiency for internet-scale applications.

Why Cloudflare Moved Away from NGINX

NGINX is a proven technology, but its limitations became evident at Cloudflare’s scale:

Security Issues

• NGINX is written in C, which makes it vulnerable to memory-related bugs like buffer overflows, use-after-free errors, and null pointer dereferencing.
• Cloudflare had to patch and monitor vulnerabilities constantly, increasing operational complexity.

Performance Limitations

• NGINX relies on a worker-thread model, which struggles under extreme concurrency loads.
• It requires manual tuning to balance performance and memory usage efficiently.

Customization Challenges

• Modifying NGINX’s source code for Cloudflare’s needs was difficult and time-consuming.
• Cloudflare needed a more flexible and maintainable solution tailored for its infrastructure.

Why Rust? The Case for a Rust-Based Proxy

Cloudflare chose Rust to build Pingora because of:

🔹 Memory Safety Without Garbage Collection

• Rust prevents use-after-free, buffer overflow, and data races with its ownership model.
• No need for complex memory management like in C or C++.

🔹 High Performance with Zero-Cost Abstractions

• Rust allows low-level optimizations while maintaining high-level expressiveness.
• It performs better than NGINX in handling high-throughput, low-latency traffic.

🔹 Asynchronous Concurrency with Tokio

• Rust’s async runtime (Tokio) allows millions of concurrent connections without blocking threads.
• Unlike NGINX’s worker model, Pingora efficiently utilizes non-blocking I/O for better scalability.

🔹 Better Developer Experience

• Rust has a strong type system and modern tooling, making development faster and more reliable.
• With cargo, dependency management and builds are easier than C-based projects.

How Pingora Improves on NGINX

Pingora is built from scratch to replace NGINX in Cloudflare’s infrastructure. Here’s how it excels:

🚀 1. More Efficient Connection Handling

• Uses Rust’s async model, making it more scalable than NGINX’s worker-thread approach.
• Handles millions of concurrent connections efficiently.

🔐 2. Stronger Security Model

• Eliminates entire classes of vulnerabilities (e.g., buffer overflows, dangling pointers).
• Safer than C-based web proxies without sacrificing performance.

🔄 3. Better Customization & Maintainability

• Cloudflare can modify and extend Pingora without relying on third-party patches.
• The codebase is cleaner, more modular, and future-proof.

⚡ 4. Lower CPU & Memory Usage

• Uses Rust’s memory optimizations for lower resource consumption.
• More cost-effective at scale compared to NGINX.

The Impact of Pingora on Web Performance

Cloudflare processes trillions of requests per month, and even a 1% efficiency improvement leads to huge savings in bandwidth and CPU usage. With Pingora:

✅ Lower Latency: Faster request processing improves page load times.
✅ Stronger DDoS Protection: Handles malicious traffic more efficiently.
✅ Higher Availability: Reduced crash risks due to Rust’s memory safety.
✅ Better Scalability: Handles extreme traffic spikes with ease.

Is Rust the Future of Web Servers?

With Cloudflare leading the way, other companies are also adopting Rust for web infrastructure:

• AWS uses Rust in its Lambda service.
• Dropbox rewrote parts of its backend in Rust.
• Discord migrated critical services from Go to Rust for performance gains.

Rust is proving to be a serious contender for high-performance networking applications, and Pingora might just be the first step toward a Rust-powered shift in web servers.

Conclusion: The End of NGINX at Cloudflare?

Pingora is already replacing NGINX for many of Cloudflare’s services, marking a major milestone in Rust’s adoption in web infrastructure. With its performance, security, and scalability advantages, Pingora might soon become a new standard for modern web proxies.

💡 Will other companies follow Cloudflare’s lead and build Rust-based proxies? Only time will tell.

Further Reading & References

🔗 Official Cloudflare Blog on Pingora
🔗 Rust’s Memory Safety Explained
🔗 Tokio: Rust’s Asynchronous Runtime