Do you need NGINX to serve static content if you are using a CDN?
Basically what it says on the tin. I'd rather not muck around with NGINX and just serve static files straight from the app server. I like having all the routing at once place.
Since something like cloudflare is a reverse proxy and caches static content, can you get away with not having nginx in front of your app server?
What level of traffic are you getting and what's your back-end?
My last project didn't use Nginx at all. My current one does, but not for performance but because it made some things convenient like Letsencrypt certs and acting as a reverse proxy for multiple separate apps. My projects are pretty much all on Phoenix Framework these days, though, and Elixir is very performant as a web server.
Circling back to my initial question, I suspect you're very far from actually needing to worry about caching static assets.
I'm doing all the pages around the app, the landing page, the login page etc. I wanted to keep doing my routing in express.js, and not have to add nginx in later on, so wanted a quick sanity check.
My server isn't exactly being thrashed right now. I think I'll continue down the route I'm on.
Node/Express isn't great for performance, but it's not terrible either.
Even if you're on a cheap VPS, you should be able to handle the front page of HN without Nginx unless something else is horribly inefficient. If you're on a shared host (e.g. dreamhost, hostgator, etc), it might be cutting it close but you could still probably serve 100k+ monthly visitors with normally distributed traffic.
I'm serving my frontend static files through my backend directly, and it works quite well. I don't even have a CDN in front.
What would you try to solve with nginx, now that you've got a CDN already?