How to Setup Nginx Load Balancing?

If you are using Nginx as your web server, you can setup load balancing technique using Nginx. It is very useful technology to distribute the incoming network across a number of servers. Using Nginx load balancing you can lower the response time, reduce the resource usage and avoid the load spike of the server.  Nginx load balancing is one of the most efficient mechanisms which is able to achieve the redundancy of full application and is very easy without any complications to setup. You can set up with the round robin algorithm, which is fairly easy to implement. By using the round robin method, it will forward all requests to the corresponding server included in the Nginx configuration. Let’s have a look into the setup of the Nginx load balancing.

 

Let’s start with the installation and initial configuration of the Nginx.

1)  Login to your server via SSH as root.

# ssh root@IP

2) Always it is a good practice to follow before any new installations make sure that the currently installed packages are up to date.

# yum update all -y

3) Install Nginx web server.

#  yum install nginx  -y

4) After the installation checks the status of the nginx.

# service nginx status

5) Append the load balancing configuration. Open the nginx configuration file of your domain with your favorite text editor.

# vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/domain.com.conf

Now append the load balancer configuration at the top of the file.

upstream loadbalancer {

server  server1.domain.com;

server server2.domain.com;

server server3.domain.com;

}

Here I have used the word server with the number, instead of this, you can use your server hostname. Make sure all the servers mentioned above must have Nginx installed and listening on 80 port.

5) Enable the upstream module. In the same configuration file itself, you need to add the upstream module on the virtual host configuration.

server {

location / {

proxy_pass http://loadbalancer;

}

}

6) After this, save the file and restart the Nginx server to get reflected by the changes made.

# service nginx restart

The changes we made using the upstream module will equally distribute all the incoming traffic among the three servers.

7) Weight Balancing, it can also be configured it distribute the traffic according to your need. That is, you can assign the servers to get the traffic accordingly. It can be done using an option called Weight balancing.

As an example refer to the following entry.

upstream loadbalancer {

server server1.domain.com weight=2;

server server2.domain.com weight= 4;

server server3.domain.com weight=5;

}

Here server2.domain.com will get twice as the traffic as that of the server1.domain.com and the server3.domain.com will get five times above the traffic as that of the server1.domain.com

Likewise, you can configure Nginx Load balancing.

 

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