Designed as a web accelerator and a frontend server, Nginx has powerful tools to delegate complex tasks to upstream servers while focusing on heavy lifting. Reverse proxy is one such tool that turns Nginx into an essential component of any high-performance web service.
By abstracting away complexities of HTTP and handling them in a scalable and efficient manner, Nginx allows web applications to focus on solving the problem they are designed to solve without stumbling upon low-level details.
In this chapter, you will learn:
How to set up Nginx as a reverse proxy
How to make proxying transparent for the upstream server and the end user
How to handle upstream errors
How to use Nginx cache
You will find out how to use all features of Nginx reverse proxy and turn it into a powerful tool for accelerating and scaling your web service.