NEWS

Load Balancing DNS Traffic with NGINX and NGINX Plus Layer 4 Load Balancing with UDP and TCP NGINX Plus R9 introduces the ability to reverse proxy and load balance UDP traffic, a significant enhancement to NGINX Plus’ Layer 4 load-balancing capabilities. This blog post looks at the challenges of running a DNS server in a modern application infrastructure to illustrate how the open source NGINX software and NGINX Plus can effectively and efficiently load balance both UDP and TCP traffic (for brevity, we’ll refer to NGINX Plus for the rest of the post). Why Load Balance UDP Traffic? Unlike TCP, UDP by design does not guarantee the end-to-end delivery of data. It is akin to sending a message by carrier pigeon – you definitely know the message was sent, but cannot be sure it arrived. There are several benefits to this “connectionless” approach – most notably, lower latency than [ more… ]

NGINX and NGINX Plus Everywhere The open source NGINX software and NGINX Plus, the commercially supported product built on NGINX, have become the application delivery platform for the most demanding web sites and applications in the world. Combined they now power over 50% of the world’s 10,000 busiest websites. NGINX and NGINX Plus provide flexibility, power, and simplicity on a scale that no other product offers. A major reason that NGINX and NGINX Plus offer unsurpassed flexibility and simplicity is that they are pure software solutions available for popular operating systems. We will come back to this point repeatedly because it is one of the key factors driving their flexibility. Many vendors of hardware and virtual appliances highlight the capabilities of their software but what they don’t mention is that the software comes pre-installed on proprietary hardware or in a pre-built virtual machine. [ more… ]