Part I: Load Balancing and HTTP Caching
This is Part I of III of NGINX Cookbook. This book is about NGINX
the web server, reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTP cache. Part I
will focus mostly on the load-balancing aspect and the advanced
features around load balancing, as well as some information around
HTTP caching. This book will touch on NGINX Plus, the licensed
version of NGINX that provides many advanced features, such as a
real-time monitoring dashboard and JSON feed, the ability to add
servers to a pool of application servers with an API call, and active
health checks with an expected response. The following chapters
have been written for an audience that has some understanding of
NGINX, modern web architectures such as n-tier or microservice
designs, and common web protocols such as TCP, UDP, and HTTP.
I wrote this book because I believe in NGINX as the strongest web
server, proxy, and load balancer we have. I also believe in NGINX’s
vision as a company. When I heard Owen Garrett, head of products
at NGINX, Inc. explain that the core of the NGINX system would
continue to be developed and open source, I knew NGINX, Inc. was
good for all of us, leading the World Wide Web with one of the most
powerful software technologies to serve a vast number of use cases.
Throughout this book, there will be references to both the free and
open source NGINX software, as well as the commercial product
from NGINX, Inc., NGINX Plus. Features and directives that are
only available as part of the paid subscription to NGINX Plus will be
denoted as such. Most readers in this audience will be users and
advocates for the free and open source solution; this book’s focus is
on just that, free and open source NGINX at its core. However, this
first part provides an opportunity to view some of the advanced fea‐
tures available in the paid solution, NGINX Plus.