Ubuntu Server Cookbook

Load balancing with Nginx

When an application becomes popular and the number of requests increases beyond the capacity of a single server, we need to scale horizontally. We can always increase the capacity (vertical scaling) of a server by adding more memory and processing power, but a single server cannot scale beyond a certain limit. While adding separate servers or replicas of the application server, we need a mechanism which directs the traffic between these replicas. The hardware or software tool used for this purpose is known as a load balancer. Load balancers work as transparent mechanisms between the application server and client by distributing the requests between available instances. This is a commonly used technique for optimizing ...