Load Balancing in the Cloud

Preface

This book is for engineers and technical managers looking to take advantage of the cloud in a way that requires a load balancing solution. I am using AWS as the example because it is widely used, and therefore will be the most useful to the most people. You’ll learn about load balancing in general, as well as AWS load balancers, AWS patterns, and the NGINX reverse proxy and load balancer. I’ve chosen to use NGINX as a software load balancer example because of its versatility and growing popularity. As adoption of NGINX grows, there are more people looking to learn about different ways they can apply the technology in their solutions. My goal is to help educate you on how you can craft a load balancing solution in the cloud that fits your needs without being prescriptive, but rather descriptive and informative.

I wrote this text to complement the AWS Quick Start guide to NGINX Plus. I truly believe in NGINX as a capable application delivery platform, and AWS as an industry leading cloud platform. That being said, there are other solutions to choose from, such as: Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, IBM Cloud, their respective platform native load balancers, HAProxy, the Apache HTTP Server with the mod_proxy module, and IIS with the URL Rewrite module. As a cloud consultant, I understand that each cloud application has different load balancing needs. I hope that the information in this book helps you design a solid solution that fits your performance, security, ...