NGINX Plus is now available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) via AWS Cloud Quickstart, and can be accessed on the AWS Community Quick Starts landing page and the AWS Quickstart Github repository.
NGINX Plus on the AWS Cloud Quick Start comprises a turn-key solution that allows users to build, configure, and deploy application environments on AWS. Quick Start, on the other hand, enables rapid implementation of the NGINX Plus load balancing and application delivery infrastructure. That being said, it is designed as a proof of concept (PoC) development solution and is not intended for immediate use with application workloads in production. AWS Quick Start reference deployments utilizes customizable CloudFormation templates to launch critical AWS services, such as computing, network, and storage.
The joint solution deploys four NGINX Plus instances “in a scalable active‑active load‑balancing infrastructure for delivering a sample PHP application.” They run on NGINX Plus Amazon Linux AMIs, with half of the instance running together with a PHP application server and the other two being HA load balancers. The NGINX Plus AMIs are able to deploy on various machine types, and billing protocols incorporate machine cost as well as NGINX Plus licensing costs.
NGINX Plus on AWS offers numerous additional features including the following:
- An AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) spanning two Availability Zones, each containing individual NGINX Plus load‑balancer and web‑application AMIs.
- An AWS Autoscaling Group running scalable instances of the NGINX Plus Amazon Linux AMI to load balance traffic between PHP applications in each Availability Zone.
- Discrete instances of the NGINX Plus Amazon Linux AMI functioning as application servers, serving PHP content spread across the two Availability Zones in the Amazon VPC.
- AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), providing inbound network connectivity to the Autoscaling Group of NGINX Plus load balancers (with network persistence for Layer 4 load balancing).
- Two NGINX Plus Amazon Linux AMI PHP web application instances which simulate application farms spanning multiple Availability Zones.
- Amazon Route 53 for DNS management of ELB and NGINX Plus IP addresses.
- Application and network session affinity (also known as session persistence) at the ELB and NGINX Plus load‑balancing layers.
- Live activity monitoring dashboard for all NGINX Plus instances.