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

Isolating application components for scalability


Scaling applications can be described by moving in two dimensions, up and out. Scaling up refers to adding more resources to a machine, growing its pool of available resources to meet client demand. Scaling out means adding more machines to a pool of available responders so that no machine gets tied up handling the majority of clients. Whether these machines are virtualized instances running in the cloud or physical machines sitting in a datacenter, it is often more cost-effective to scale out rather than up. This is where NGINX fits in handily as a reverse proxy.

Due to its very low resource usage, NGINX acts ideally as the broker in a client-application relationship. NGINX handles the connection to the client, able to process multiple requests simultaneously. Depending on the configuration, NGINX will either deliver a file from its local cache or pass the request on to an upstream server for further processing. The upstream server can be...