Most of the stuff I've done for reverse proxies has been pretty straightforward and just using the stuff built into Nginx, but I have to admit that it wouldn't have even occurred to me to use FastCGI if I needed something more elaborate.

I used FastCGI a bit about ten years ago to "convert" some C++ code I wrote to work on the web, but admittedly I haven't used it much since then.

I remember the great FastCGI vs. SCGI vs. HTTP wars: I was founding a Web2.0 startup right at the time these technologies were gaining adoption, and so was responsible for setting up the frontend stack. HTTP won because of simplicity: instead of needing to introduce another protocol into your stack, you can just use HTTP, which you already needed to handle at the gateway. Now all sorts of complex network topologies became trivial: you could introduce multiple levels of reverse proxies if you ran out of capacity; you could have servers that specialized in authentication or session management or SSL termination or DDoS filtering or all the other cross-cutting concerns without them needing to know their position in the request chain; and you could use the same application servers for development, with a direct HTTP connection, as you did in production, where they'd sit behind a reverse proxy that handled SSL and authentication and abuse detection.

It also helped that nginx was lots faster than most FastCGI/SCGI modules of the time, and more robust. I'd initially setup my startup's stack as HTTP -> Lighttpd -> FastCGI -> Django, but it was way slower than just using nginx.

The use of HTTP was basically the web equivalent of the End-to-End Principle [1] for TCP/IP. It's the idea that the network and its protocols should be agnostic to what's being transmitted, and all application logic should be in nodes of the network that filter and redirect packets accordingly. This has been a very powerful principle and shouldn't be discarded lightly.

The observation the article makes is that for security, it's often better to follow the Principle of Least Privilege [2] rather than blindly passing information along. Allowlist your communications to only what you expect, so that you aren't unwittingly contributing to a compromise elsewhere in the network.

And the article is highlighting - not explicitly, but it's there - the tension between these two principles. E2E gives you flexibility, but with flexibility comes the potential for someone to use that flexibility to cause harm. PoLP gives you security, but at the cost of inflexibility, where your system can only do what you designed it to do and cannot easily adapt to new requirements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege

I don't know if anything else in the RHEL distributions use FastCGI.

  $ rpm -qi php-fpm | grep ^Summary
  Summary     : PHP FastCGI Process Manager