Load Balancing in the Cloud

Chapter 7. Scaling and Security

Scaling your application has a lot to do with the way it’s delivered and configured. In this chapter you will learn common practices for maintaining order in your environments, and getting the most out of the machines you do run. You will learn about infrastructure and configuration management as code, the NGINX Controller platform, as well as the value of caching and Content Delivery Networks. Finally you will learn how to secure your application from application-level attacks.

Managing Cloud with Infrastructure and Configuration Management

When working with a layer 7 load balancer to deliver an application, you must have a way to manage the configuration. When working in the cloud, with auto scaling applications and load balancers, you will need a way for these services to be provisioned and configured automatically. Serving those needs is configuration and infrastructure management. Configuration management is a process for ensuring a system’s configuration is reproducible, and infrastructure management is a process of ensuring infrastructure is reproducible.

Infrastructure and configuration management tools come in the form of declarative state definitions. With these tools you’re able to manage your infrastructure and system configurations as code. Just as with applications code it’s best practice to keep this code in source control and version it along with your application release cycle. In doing so you’re able to reproduce the same environment, ...