NGINX

NGINX Internal Architecture

NGINX Internal Architecture

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Here the connection is managed by the kernel and later consumes by the NGINX worker process.

NGINX Use Cases

1. Web Server
2. Forward and Reverse Proxy > Reverse Proxy
   1. Load Balancer
   2. Backend Routing
   3. Caching - NGINX
   4. API Gateway

NGNIX as a Load Balancer

NGINX as a Load Balancer

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Here the frontend means the interface that is listening to the client requests and the backend is what is communicating with the services

Layer 4 and 7 Load Balancing

In layer 4 we see the TCP/IP stack and nothing about the app itself, we have access to the

• source IP, source port
• destination IP, destination port
• simple packet inspection (SYN/TCP hello)

using this we can log some really useful information about the application traffic

In layer 7 we see the application data, HTTP/gRPC

• we have more access to the context
• what URL they are visiting
• require decryption
  • whenever you use a CDN - Content Delivery Network like Cloudflare or a proxy service they decrypt the traffic inorder to cache or store the response, which is not secure for highly confidential data, but our mileage may vary.

layer 4 is useful when NGINX server does not understand the protocol like a database connection protocol and layer 7 is useful when NGINX wants to share the backend connections and cache the results

use the stream context to become a layer 4 proxy, and http context for a layer 7 proxy

NGINX Timeouts

Nginx Timeouts

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