NGINX and NGINX Plus can be used to load balance Wildfly (JBoss) application servers, enabling them to handle a larger volume of users while providing an overall faster and more consistent user experience with Wildfly applications.
To help customers get the most out of their Wildfly deployments, NGINX, Inc. has published a new deployment guide, Load Balancing Wildfly and JBoss Application Servers with NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus. This guide details how NGINX and NGINX Plus can be utilized as a load balancer and application delivery controller for application servers running Wildfly and the commercial version supported by Red Hat, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.
Why NGINX and NGINX Plus?
Load balancing across multiple application instances is a commonly used technique for optimizing resource utilization, maximizing throughput, reducing latency, and ensuring fault-tolerant configurations. The ability of NGINX and NGINX Plus to scale and handle a large number of simultaneous connections using a very small memory footprint makes them a great choice to load balance your Wildfly application servers.
In addition to performance and scale, the open source NGINX software provides a number of benefits for Wildfly applications:
- Event-driven architecture – NGINX provides much greater scalability and resilience to traffic spikes and DOS attacks than Wildfly application servers offer on their own.
- SPDY and HTTP/2 support – NGINX supports both the SPDY and HTTP/2 protocols, which offer improved performance over HTTP/1.1.
- Load balancing – The variety of load balancing algorithms in NGINX enable you to scale out your Wildfly applications as well as maintain high availability.
- TLS/SSL termination – NGINX can terminate TLS/SSL connections to offload that work from the Wildfly servers.
- Caching – NGINX acts as a highly capable cache for both static and dynamic content, which greatly improves application performance.
And NGINX Plus, the enhanced and commercially supported product, builds on NGINX with additional enterprise-ready features:
- Application health checks – NGINX Plus proactively monitors Wildfly application servers and stops sending requests to unhealthy servers.
- Session persistence – NGINX Plus leverages the JSESSIONID cookie to ensure that a user’s requests are forwarded to the same Wildfly application server every time.
- Dynamic reconfiguration of load‑balanced servers – You can reconfigure load‑balanced server groups (both HTTP, TCP, and UDP) dynamically using the Domain Name System (DNS) or a simple HTTP API.
- Live activity monitoring – NGINX Plus has a real-time activity monitoring interface that provides key load and performance metrics.
How Do I Get Started?
To get started using NGINX and NGINX Plus with Wildfly application servers, download the new >deployment guide developed by NGINX. It provides step-by-step instructions configuring NGINX and NGINX Plus to efficiently load balance and scale your servers. Configuration files for basic and enhanced load balancing are also available so you don’t have to cut and paste from the guide.
Experienced with Wildfly but new to NGINX Plus? Take advantage of our free 30-day trial or contact us to discuss your use cases, and see for yourself how NGINX Plus can boost the performance and manageability of your Wildfly applications.
Resources
- Load Balancing Wildfly and JBoss Application Servers with NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus
- Configuration file for basic load balancing of Wildfly application servers (for experienced NGINX Plus users)
- Configuration file for enhanced load balancing of Wildfly application servers< (for experienced NGINX Plus users)
