Load Balancing in the Cloud

Chapter 8. Conclusion

You should now have the information you need to design a resilient load balancing solution for your cloud application. The approaches, patterns, and examples described in this book will help guide you whether you plan to use NGINX and AWS or another load balancer and cloud provider combination.

As you go forth to build your cloud load balancing solution, keep in mind the importance of automatic registration, deregistration, health checking, and the ability to scale your load balancer horizontally. Think about the likelihood of your solution needing to exist outside of your cloud vendor, and determine the value of your solution being portable to other providers. Consider your application needs for session persistence and examine if now is the right time to centralize session state to alleviate this need.

If you have not already, try out the Amazon Quick Start for NGINX Plus to get a feel for the AWS environment and see if NGINX or NGINX Plus is a good fit for your solution. Take note of the value provided by CloudFormation and Configuration Management that enables you to build up the Quick Start without any manual configuration. Remind yourself that Infrastructure and Configuration management not only provides you a repeatable deployment but also the ability to reliably test and build quality gates for your systems and security.

Consider your monitoring and logging plan and how your load balancing solution will integrate with that plan to give you the insight ...