There are other tools that can be used to load balance applications. Some are similar to NGINX, where configuration is defined through external configuration files. Then, we can send a signal to the running process to reload the updated configuration. Some have their pool configurations stored in an outside store, such as Redis, etcd, and even regular databases, so that the list is dynamically loaded by the load balancer itself. Even NGINX has some of these functionalities in its commercial offering. There are also other open source projects that extend NGINX with third-party modules.
The following is a short list of load balancers that we can deploy as some form of Docker containers in our infrastructure:
- HAProxy (http://www.haproxy.org)
- Apache HTTP Server (http://httpd.apache.org)
- Traefik (https://traefik.io/)
There are also hardware-based load balancers that we can procure ourselves and configure via their own proprietary formats or APIs. If we use cloud providers, some...