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.