[jrochkind1]

If you weren't caching with CDN, would serving those static assets as efficiently as possible be a good reason to keep using (eg) nginx, do you think?

Oh, I guess load balancing (with a multiple-host scale) is another good reason, if you don't have heroku doing it for you, nginx is a convenient way to do it just fine.

[nathan_f77]

I don't know if there's any middle ground where you'd want to use Nginx instead of a CDN. If it's an internal app then it doesn't really matter. But if you have any reason to worry about the performance of serving static assets, then you should always be using a CDN like CloudFront or CloudFlare, etc.

But yeah, Nginx can be a great solution for load balancing and TLS termination.