Yesterday, Valentin Bartenev, a developer at Nginx, Inc., announced SPDY support for the Nginx web server. SPDY is a next-generation networking protocol developed by Google and focused on making the web faster. More information on SPDY can be found on Wikipedia.

At Automattic, we have used Nginx since 2008. Since then, it has made its way into almost every piece of our web infrastructure. We use it for load balancing, image serving (via MogileFS), serving static and dynamic web content, and caching. In fact, we have almost 1000 servers running Nginx today, serving over 100,000 requests per second.

I met Andrew and Igor at WordCamp San Fransicso in 2011.  For the next six months, we discussed the best way for Automattic and Nginx, Inc. to work together. In December 2011, we agreed that Automattic would sponsor the development and integration of SPDY into Nginx. The…