Benefits of load balancing NGINX Web Servers

The main benefits of load balancing NGINX’s web server are:

• High Availability (HA): Load balancing eliminates a single point of failure in enterprise architecture, ensuring continuous service even if one or more servers fail. The load balancer continuously performs health checks on all backend servers. If a server stops responding or fails its health check, the load balancer automatically takes it out of the rotation and redirects all traffic to the remaining healthy servers. By using multiple servers for the same application, redundancy is built into the system. This minimizes the risk of downtime for users, leading to higher uptime and a more reliable application.
• Scalability: Load balancing allows the application to handle traffic growth easily and efficiently. It supports horizontal scaling by allowing more servers to be simply plugged into the backend pool. This is generally more cost-effective and flexible than vertical scaling (upgrading a single, more powerful server). During unexpected traffic surges (e.g., a viral event or a holiday sale), the load balancer ensures the load is spread out, preventing any single server from becoming overwhelmed and crashing.
• Improved performance: By distributing the workload, load balancing ensures that all servers operate efficiently, leading to a better user experience. Traffic is sent to the least-busy or most-capable servers, which prevents any one server from being overloaded. This maximizes the utilization of existing hardware. By minimizing server strain, requests are processed more quickly, which reduces latency and improves the overall response time of the HTTP application.

About NGINX Web Servers

NGINX is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, as well as an IMAP/POP3 proxy server. Igor Sysoev started development of NGINX in 2002, with the first public release in 2004. NGINX now hosts nearly 12.18% (22.2M) of active sites across all domains. NGINX is known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

NGINX is one of a handful of servers written to address the C10K problem. Unlike traditional servers, NGINX doesn’t rely on threads to handle requests. Instead it uses a much more scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture. This architecture uses small, but more importantly, predictable amounts of memory under load.

Even if you don’t expect to handle thousands of simultaneous requests, you can still benefit from NGINX’s high-performance and small memory footprint. NGINX scales in all directions: from the smallest VPS all the way up to clusters of servers.

NGINX powers several high-visibility sites, such as Netflix, Hulu, Pinterest, CloudFlare, Airbnb, WordPress.com, GitHub, SoundCloud, Zynga, Eventbrite, Zappos, Media Temple, Heroku, RightScale, Engine Yard and MaxCDN.

Why Loadbalancer.org for NGINX Web Servers?

Loadbalancer’s intuitive Enterprise Application Delivery Controller (ADC) is designed to save time and money with a clever, not complex, WebUI. 

Easily configure, deploy, manage, and maintain our Enterprise load balancer, reducing complexity and the risk of human error. For a difference you can see in just minutes.

And with WAF and GSLB included straight out-of-the-box, there’s no hidden costs, so the prices you see on our website are fully transparent. 

More on what’s possible with Loadbalancer.org.

How to load balance NGINX Web Servers

Load balancing deployment concept (in AWS)

The ports/services load balanced are:

Port	Use	Transport Layer Protocol
80	HTTP	TCP
443	HTTPS	TCP

The diagram below shows how the system is configured in AWS:

Load balancing deployment concept (in Azure)

The ports/services load balanced are:

Port	Use	Transport Layer Protocol
80	HTTP	TCP
443	HTTPS	TCP

The diagram below shows how the system is configured in Azure:

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