Serving from cache when your backend is down

While we don't want to see a scenario where your backend server is down, expecting to maintain 100 percent uptime simply isn't realistic. Whether it's unexpected or planned upgrades, having the ability to still serve content is a great feature.

With NGINX, we can tell it to serve stale cache data when it can't reach your backend server. Having a page which is slightly out-of-date is (in most scenarios) a far better outcome than sending the client a 502 HTTP error (Bad Gateway).

Getting ready

As the caching is part of the standard NGINX platform, no additional prerequisites are required.

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