Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By : Dimitri Aivaliotis
Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By: Dimitri Aivaliotis

Overview of this book

NGINX is a high-performance HTTP server and mail proxy designed to use very few system resources. But despite its power it is often a challenge to properly configure NGINX to meet your expectations. Mastering Nginx is the solution – an insider’s guide that will clarify the murky waters of NGINX’s configuration. Tune NGINX for various situations, improve your NGINX experience with some of the more obscure configuration directives, and discover how to design and personalize a configuration to match your needs. To begin with, quickly brush up on installing and setting up the NGINX server on the OS and its integration with third-party modules. From here, move on to explain NGINX's mail proxy module and its authentication, and reverse proxy to solve scaling issues. Then see how to integrate NGINX with your applications to perform tasks. The latter part of the book focuses on working through techniques to solve common web issues and the know-hows using NGINX modules. Finally, we will also explore different configurations that will help you troubleshoot NGINX server and assist with performance tuning.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering NGINX - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Directive Reference
Persisting Solaris Network Tunings
Index

Chapter 5. Reverse Proxy Advanced Topics

As we saw in the previous chapter, a reverse proxy makes connections to the upstream servers on behalf of clients. These upstream servers, therefore, have no direct connection to the client. This is for several different reasons, such as security, scalability, and performance.

Security is enhanced via the dual-layer nature of such a setup. If an attacker were to try to get onto the upstream server directly, he would first have to find a way to get onto the reverse proxy. Connections to the client can be encrypted by running them over HTTPS. These SSL connections may be terminated on the reverse proxy, when the upstream server cannot or should not provide this functionality itself. NGINX can act as an SSL terminator as well as provide additional access lists and restrictions based on various client attributes.

Scalability can be achieved by utilizing a reverse proxy to make parallel connections to multiple upstream servers, enabling them to act as if...