Nginx Open Sources TCP Load Balancing

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Mattias Geniar, April 20, 2015

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A move we can only applaud.

Stream: port from NGINX+.

diffstat 20 files changed, 6079 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) [+]

Changeset commit: changeset 6115:61d7ae76647d

A cryptic commit message for anyone that doesn’t follow Nginx. But here’s what it means: the TCP load balancing present in Nginx+ is now available in Nginx Open Source.

This kind of load balancing was reserved for paying Nginx+ customers, until now.

TCP Load Balancing

NGINX Plus terminates TCP connections, makes a load-balancing decision and then establishes a connection to the upstream server, relaying data between the client and server on demand. NGINX Plus delivers high availability using inline and synthetic health checks, slow-start for recovered servers, concurrency control, and the ability to designate servers as active, backup, or down.

Nginx+ Load Balancing

TCP Load Balancing would allow for setups to remove HAProxy or an alternative TCP load balancer and use Nginx for all of it. Previously, Nginx would do HTTP, POP3 and IMAP load balancing, but always within the protocol. Now, it will support native TCP connections as well.

More info on the TCP load balancing in Nginx+ can be found on the announcement of Nginx R6: Announcing NGINX Plus Release 6 with Enhanced Load Balancing.

A great move to make this Open Source, can’t wait to see this made available in their RPM and DEB packages.

Would I be too optimistic in hoping that the Nginx+ Application Health Checks would also be ported into Nginx Open Source? Because that would be awesome and would eliminate Varnish as a advanced health-check proxy for backends in some of my configs.



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