NEWS

Service Discovery in NGINX Plus via etcd Service discovery is one of the big challenges for applications with a microservices architecture and for other distributed or service-oriented systems. The network locations of service instances can change frequently due to autoscaling, failures, or upgrades, so they are usually dynamically assigned. That means applications need a sophisticated service discovery mechanism for tracking the existence and current location of a service instance. This blog post describes how to dynamically add or remove servers in an NGINX Plus upstream group by registering them with etcd, a popular open source tool for service discovery. The solution uses NGINX Plus’ on-the-fly reconfiguration API, which eliminates the need to reload the NGINX Plus configuration when changing the set of load-balanced servers. With NGINX Plus Release 8 (R8), changes you make with the API can be configured to persist across restarts [ more… ]

Using Free SSL/TLS Certificates from Let’s Encrypt for NGINX Let’s Encrypt is a new certificate authority (CA) offering free and automated SSL/TLS certificates. Certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt are trusted by most browsers in production today, including Internet Explorer on Windows Vista. Simply download and run the Let’s Encrypt client to generate a certificate (there are a few more steps than that, of course, though not many). Before issuing a certificate, Let’s Encrypt validates ownership of your domain. First, The Let’s Encrypt client running on your host creates a temporary file (a token) with the required information in it. The Let’s Encrypt validation server makes an HTTP request to retrieve the file and validates the token, which serves to verify that the DNS record for your domain resolves to the server running the Let’s Encrypt client. The Let’s Encrypt client does not yet officially support NGINX and NGINX Plus [ more… ]