Load Balancing with Nginx

Abstract

So far in this book, you have seen the power of Nginx as a web server. However, Nginx is much more than that. It is frequently used as a proxy server. A proxy server's job is to front end the request and pass it on to the proxied server, which is also known as an upstream server. The upstream server processes the request and sends the response back to the Nginx server, which further relays the response to the clients who made the request. You may think, why do you need to complicate things as much? Wouldn't it make the processing slower because of the number of hops? This chapter focuses on answers to similar questions, and you will learn about setting up servers based on different scenarios.