Isolating application components for scalability

Scaling applications can be described by moving in two dimensions, up and out. Scaling up refers to adding more resources to a machine, growing its pool of available resources to meet client demand. Scaling out means adding more machines to a pool of available responders so that no machine gets tied up handling the majority of clients. Whether these machines are virtualized instances running in the cloud or physical machines sitting in a datacenter, it is often more cost-effective to scale out rather than up. This is where NGINX fits in handily as a reverse proxy.

Due to its very low resource usage, NGINX acts ideally as the broker in a client-application relationship. NGINX handles the connection to the client, able to process multiple requests simultaneously. Depending on the configuration, NGINX will either deliver a file from its local cache or pass the request on to an upstream server for further processing. The upstream server can be...