Load Balancer Server using NGINX

Nginx is open source software for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming, and more. NGINX is highly scalable as well, meaning that its service grows along with its clients traffic.

Load balancing across multiple application instances is a commonly used technique for optimizing resource utilization, maximizing throughput, reducing latency, and ensuring fault-tolerant configurations.

It is possible to use Nginx as a very efficient HTTP load balancer to distribute traffic to several application servers and to improve performance, scalability and reliability of web applications with Nginx.

Load Balancer Methods

The following load balancing mechanisms are supported in Nginx:

Round-robin — Requests to the application servers are distributed in a round-robin fashion.

Least-connected — Next request is assigned to the server with the least number of active connections.

IP-hash — A hash-function is used to determine what server should be selected for the next request (based on the client’s IP address).

Session persistence - With ip-hash, the client’s IP address is used as a hashing key to determine what server in a server group should be selected for the client’s requests. This method ensures that the requests from the same client will always be directed to the same server.

Weighted load balancing - It is also possible to influence Nginx load balancing algorithms even further by using server weights

Reverse proxy implementation in Nginx includes load balancing for HTTP, HTTPS, FastCGI, uwsgi, SCGI, memcached, and gRPC

Load balancing with in-band health checks

NGINX can continually test your HTTP upstream servers, avoid the servers that have failed, and gracefully add the recovered servers into the load‑balanced group. Reverse proxy implementation in Nginx includes in-band (or passive) server health checks. If the response from a particular server fails with an error, Nginx will mark this server as failed, and will try to avoid selecting this server for subsequent inbound requests for a while.

Passive Health Checks

Health check a URI

Define Custom Conditions

Test your TCP upstream servers

UDP Health Checks

Support / Documentation

Follow the post setup instructions on our website - Setup NGINX Load Balancer on Azure

Nginx Ports

The following ports are enabled.

TCP - 80

TCP - 443

Disclaimer: This solution is built using Nginx, Inc. and its contributors, an opensource software. This solution is Licensed under the 2-clause BSD license.