Nginx as a Load Balancer

Guys recently I implemented Nginx as a load balancer.

The scenario was that we have two Apache backend servers serving same webpage. We were using Amazon ELB as a front-end to balance load for those backend Apache servers. And we were paying to Amazon for their instance.

So I implemented (Replaced Nginx in place of ELB) Nginx as a load balancer.

Below is the sample configuration file of my nginx.conf

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upstream front_cluster {

        ip_hash;

        server 10.64.0.11:80    weight=1 max_fails=2 fail_timeout=20;

        server 10.64.0.10:80    weight=1 max_fails=2 fail_timeout=20;

        }

    server {

        listen       80 ; ssl off;

        listen 443   ssl;

        server_name  abc.com;

        access_log  logs/abc.com.access.log;

        error_log  logs/abc.com.error.log  info;

        ssl_certificate      /usr/local/nginx/abc.crt;

        ssl_certificate_key  /usr/local/nginx/abc.key;

        location / {

                proxy_pass http://front_cluster/;

                proxy_set_header Host $server_name;

        }

        location /lb_health_status {

                check_status;

                access_log   off;

        }
}

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In this configuration we were using nginx for balancing https and https both traffic to backend servers.

Also we are checking the health status of backend servers by nginx health check module.