One of the first use cases that I tried NGINX out for was simply as an SSL termination proxy. If you have an application which can't directly produce HTTPS (encrypted) output, you can use NGINX as a proxy to do this. Content is served from your backend in plain text, then the connection between NGINX and the browser is encrypted. To help explain, here's a diagram covering the scenario:
The advantage is that you also get to make use of all the other NGINX feature sets too, especially when it comes to caching. In fact, if you've used the Cloudflare service to achieve a similar outcome, then you may be surprised to know that it's NGINX-based as well.
