Load Balancing in the Cloud

Chapter 3. NGINX Load Balancing in the Cloud

It’s hard to know how to apply this advice without a concrete example. I’ve chosen to focus on NGINX and AWS to show you precisely how you might go about load balancing in the cloud because of their existing and growing market share in the load balancing space. NGINX is more than just a load balancer, it’s a full application delivery controller. Application delivery controllers are load balancers that have an advanced set of options that allow you to fully control how your application is delivered. NGINX is a software load balancer that brings a lot to the table. This chapter will introduce you to a subset of important features of NGINX, its portability, and its scaling capacity.

Feature Set

NGINX is free and open source software; NGINX Plus is a licensed option that offers advanced features and enterprise-level support. In this section I will outline features of NGINX, and NGINX Plus, and I will specify when examples are paid features of NGINX Plus.

The features that are included in NGINX, the open source solution, are fully capable of delivering your application. NGINX Inc. has stated that they will continue to maintain and develop the open source code base. At its core NGINX is a reverse proxy and load balancer. NGINX can load balance both TCP and UDP, and has specific modules for HTTP(S) and Email protocols. The proxy features provide a basis for NGINX to control requests, responses, and routing for an application. There are numerous ...