Administrators of traditional hardware application delivery controllers (ADCs) are often faced with use cases that the rule sets provided by ADC vendors don't cover, and certainly not at the necessary fine‑grained level of control over how requests and responses are processed. As a result, most organizations have written their own custom rules, and as they…
Continue reading ›NGINX Plus and Google Load Balancers on the Google Cloud Platform
[ngx_snippet name='table-style-blog'] [Editor – This post has been updated to refer to the NGINX Plus API, which replaces and deprecates the separate dynamic configuration module mentioned in the original version of the post. For step‑by‑step instructions on deploying a highly available NGINX Plus load‑balancing configuration on GCE, see our deployment guide, All-Active HA for NGINX Plus on…
Continue reading ›NGINX Plus and Microsoft Azure Load Balancers
[ngx_snippet name='table-style-blog'] [Editor – This post has been updated to refer to the NGINX Plus API, which replaces and deprecates the separate dynamic configuration module mentioned in the original version of the post.] Customers using Microsoft Azure have three options for load balancing: NGINX Plus, the Azure load balancing services, or NGINX Plus in conjunction with the Azure…
Continue reading ›Mitigating DDoS Attacks with NGINX and NGINX Plus
A Distributed Denial‑of‑Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make a service, usually a website, unavailable by bombarding it with so much traffic from multiple machines that the server providing the service is no longer able to function correctly because of resource exhaustion. Typically, the attacker tries to saturate a system with so many connections and…
Continue reading ›Network vs. DevOps: How to Manage Your Control Issues
There’s no disputing that technology and infrastructure have changed dramatically over the years. Web sites have long since evolved from “just-a-bunch-of-files-and-scripts” to an intricate mix of modular applications made up of reusable code components – all using HTTP, which has become the dominant protocol for Internet communication. And these web applications now run people’s lives. Users…
Continue reading ›NGINX Plus and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing on AWS
[ngx_snippet name='table-style-blog'] Customers using Amazon Web Services (AWS) often ask us whether to use NGINX Plus or Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) for application load balancing. Amazon has published a whitepaper that describes how to set up NGINX Plus on AWS. This post focuses on the factors to consider as you choose between NGINX Plus and ELB, as…
Continue reading ›Reverse Proxy Using NGINX Plus
NGINX has gained justifiable fame as a very high‑performance web server. I think many people realize that NGINX can also be used as a reverse proxy, but they might not be aware of just what a powerful reverse proxy it is. What Is a Reverse Proxy? Let's start by taking a step back and asking,…
Continue reading ›Replacing Cisco ACE with NGINX Plus
Note: If you're interested in moving off of Cisco ACE, check out our new step-by-step ebook, Cisco ACE to NGINX: Migration Guide
With the announcement by Cisco that they are discontinuing development of their Application Control Engine (ACE) load balancer, enterprises that have deployed ACE load balancers are faced with the challenge of finding an alternative for their load balancing needs. The saying that "there are no challenges, only opportunities" is particularly relevant in this case.
Companies have the opportunity to chart a new and better course. Rather then replacing one expensive and inflexible proprietary hardware appliance with another, they can move into the future with NGINX Plus, an extremely cost effective and flexible software-based load balancing solution that can easily and quickly be deployed on commodity hardware, in a virtualized environment, or in the cloud. NGINX Plus is already used at many of the highest volume websites in the world, so it is known for its extreme scalability but it also brings the rich Layer-7 load balancing functionality of a modern application delivery controller (ADC).
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