Question

Is it safe to handle requests directly by Jetty or Tomcat?
Or only reverse proxy (such as nginx) can prevent abuses (slow data transferring on purpose etc)?

PS: ofcouse I serve static content with nginx =)

Answer 1

yes, jetty or tomcat are both safe to expose to the world at large, the days of being required to deploy apache in front of them disappeared years ago.

that being said you still need to design your application and configure any container well to handle scale, prevent abuse, etc.

jetty is used in many places, in production situations, serving massive volumes of requests without issue and with a light footprint

heck, jetty even runs well on android phones