Fundamentals of NGINX

NGINX is an open-source web server written in C and can also be used as a reverse proxy and a load balancer.   This class Is an introduction to NGINX, by the end of this class you will be able to understand the fundamentals of NGINX and spin up your own instance and even secure it with a legitimate certificate. 

Here are the topics that I will discuss:

• What is NGINX?

• NGINX Use Cases

• Layer 4 and Layer 7 Proxying in Nginx

• NGINX Timoouts

• Example

  • Install Nginx (mac) 

  • Nginx as a Web Server 

    • Static content

    • Regular expression in NGINX

    • proxy_pass

  • Nginx as a Layer 7 Proxy

    • Proxy to 4 backend NodeJS services (docker)

    • IP_Hash load balancing

    • Split load to multiple backends (app1/app2)

    • Block certain requests (/admin)

  • NGINX as a Layer 4 Proxy

  • Create DNS record

  • Enable HTTPS on NGINX (lets encrypt)

  • Enable TLS 1.3 on NGINX

  • Enable HTTP/2 on NGINX

A small blurb about NGINX

NGINX is one of a handful of servers written to address the C10K problem. Unlike traditional servers, NGINX doesn’t rely on threads to handle requests. Instead it uses a much more scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture. This architecture uses small, but more importantly, predictable amounts of memory under load. Even if you don’t expect to handle thousands of simultaneous requests, you can still benefit from NGINX’s high-performance and small memory footprint. NGINX scales in all directions: from the smallest VPS all the way up to large clusters of servers.