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Web Server Load Balancing with NGINX Plus

NGINX has launched a new, preferred high availability (HA) solution for Amazon Web Services (AWS). This solution takes advantage of the new AWS Network Load Balancer (AWS NLB) to improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of web applications on AWS.

The scale of application deployments on AWS has grown very rapidly. Amazon has key resources:

In addition, NGINX has a wide range of resources about AWS:

AWS NLB provides a fast and effective solution for basic, Layer 4 load balancing. We here at NGINX are excited about this new AWS offering and how well it integrates with NGINX Plus, providing our preferred solution for making NGINX Plus highly available on AWS. To showcase this integration, we are publishing a deployment guide to help you pair AWS NLB with NGINX Plus.

This resource is very helpful, whether you’re new to large‑scale deployments on AWS or a seasoned pro. With the step-by-step instructions in the deployment guide, you can create a solution that handles a whole range of application deployment challenges:

  • Fast Layer 4 load balancing with the new AWS NLB.
  • Support for AWS Elastic IP addresses.
  • Highly available, all‑active Layer 7 load balancing with a set of NGINX Plus instances. NGINX Plus supports content‑based routing, advanced load balancing algorithms, caching, real‑time configuration changes, session persistence, and application‑aware health checks.
  • Multiple server instances running NGINX Open Source, to efficiently run your application code.
  • Support for AWS Auto Scaling, the circuit breaker pattern, and more.

This new load‑balancing solution with NGINX Plus on AWS offers power and advanced capabilities. It depends on AWS NLB to handle basic Layer 4 load balancing. By making robust use of NGINX Plus for the rest of the solution, it’s able to run relatively inexpensively, creating a robust load‑balancing solution on AWS.

This solution joins a set of highly available NGINX Plus load‑balancing solutions for on‑premises deployments (on bare metal, containers, or virtual machines) and other cloud environments. Its architecture is similar to the all‑active, highly available NGINX Plus‑based load‑balancing architecture for Google Cloud Engine (GCE), which uses the GCE network load balancer for Layer 4 load balancing.

To try NGINX Plus, start your free 30-day trial today or contact us to discuss your use cases. Then follow the step-by-step instructions in the deployment guide to pair AWS NLB with NGINX Plus.

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About The Author

Alessandro Fael Garcia

Alessandro Fael Garcia

Technical Marketing Engineer

About F5 NGINX

F5, Inc. is the company behind NGINX, the popular open source project. We offer a suite of technologies for developing and delivering modern applications. Together with F5, our combined solution bridges the gap between NetOps and DevOps, with multi-cloud application services that span from code to customer.

Learn more at nginx.com or join the conversation by following @nginx on Twitter.