NGINX is one of the most widely used web servers available today, in part because of itscapabilities as a load balancer and reverse proxy server for HTTP and other network protocols. This revised cookbook provides easy-to-follow examples of real-world problems in application delivery. Practical recipes help you set up and use either the open source or commercial offering to solve problems in various use cases.

For professionals who understand modern web architectures, such as n-tier or microservice designs and common web protocols such as TCP and HTTP, these recipes provide proven solutions for security and software load balancing and for monitoring and maintaining NGINX's application delivery platform. You'll also explore advanced features of both NGINX and NGINX Plus, the free and licensed versions of this server.

You'll find recipes for:

• High-performance load balancing with HTTP, TCP, and UDP
• Securing access through encrypted traffic, secure links, HTTP authentication subrequests, and more
• Deploying NGINX to Google, AWS, and Azure cloud
• Setting up and configuring NGINX Controller
• Installing and configuring the NGINX App Protect module
• Enabling WAF through Controller ADC
• NGINX Instance Manager, Service Mesh, and the njs module

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Basics

Chapter 2. High-Performance Load Balancing

Chapter 3. Traffic Management

Chapter 4. Massively Scalable Content Caching

Chapter 5. Programmability and Automation

Chapter 6. Authentication

Chapter 7. Security Controls

Chapter 8. HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (QUIC)

Chapter 9. Sophisticated Media Streaming

Chapter 10. Cloud Deployments

Chapter 11. Containers/Microservices

Chapter 12. High-Availability Deployment Modes

Chapter 13. Advanced Activity Monitoring

Chapter 14. Debugging and Troubleshooting with Access Logs, Error Logs, and Request Tracing

Chapter 15. Performance Tuning

The NGINX Cookbook aims to provide easy-to-follow examples of real-world problems in application delivery. Throughout this book, you will explore the many features of NGINX and how to use them. This guide is fairly comprehensive, and touches on most of the main capabilities of NGINX.

The book will begin by explaining the installation process of NGINX and NGINX Plus, as well as some basic getting-started steps for readers new to NGINX. From there, the sections will progress to load balancing in all forms, accompanied by chapters about traffic management, caching, and automation. Chapter 6, “Authentication”, covers a lot of ground, but it is important because NGINX is often the first point of entry for web traffic to your application, and the first line of application-layer defense against web attacks and vulnerabilities. There are a number of chapters that cover cutting-edge topics such as HTTP/3 (QUIC), media streaming, cloud, SAML Auth, and container environments—wrapping up with more traditional operational topics such as monitoring, debugging, performance, and operational tips.

I personally use NGINX as a multitool, and I believe this book will enable you to do the same. It’s software that I believe in and enjoy working with. I’m happy to share this knowledge with you, and I hope that as you read through this book you relate the recipes to your real-world scenarios and will employ these solutions.

About the Author

Derek is an Amazon Web Services Certified Professional. He specializes in Linux/Unix based Systems and Web Applications. His background in Web Development, System Administration and Networking make him a valuable cloud resource. A lot of his focus lately has been Infrastructure Management, Configuration management, Continuous Integration and developing tools for a dynamic infrastructure (DevOps). He maintains the systems, networks and deployments of multiple multi-tenant SaaS offerings.