SOA: Is using PHP FPM to serve webservice traffic without NGINX a good idea?

Question

I'm in the processes of developing a service oriented architecture using PHP.

A member of my team has suggested that because each of the services serves only HTTP traffic, serving responses only in JSON (no static assets etc) that it's preferable to run just FPM and have load balancers send traffic directly to the ip address of the instance and the port exposed by FPM.

I've previously only heard of running PHP-FPM and Nginx together. All the literature online suggests running NGINX and FPM together but doesn't explain why. Is the only benefit provided by NGINX the ability to serve static assets along with output generated by PHP?

If NGINX is adding value in another way, what is it doing and where can I find supporting documentation.

Answer 1

PHP-FPM doesn't (as far as I know) speak http, it speaks fastcgi. A web browser therefore can't talk to it directly -- you need to have something like nginx in between to convert http requests to fastcgi requests.