NGINX Plus is the all‑in‑one application delivery platform for the modern web.
NGINX is the world’s most popular open source web server and load balancer for high‑traffic sites, powering over 185 million properties.
NGINX Plus adds enterprise-ready features for HTTP, TCP, and UDP load balancing, such as session persistence, health checks, advanced monitoring, and management to give you the freedom to innovate without being constrained by infrastructure.
NGINX Plus as an Application Load Balancer
Distribute traffic across groups of upstreams servers when using NGINX Plus as an application load balancer.
NGINX Plus supports the same load balancing methods as the open source NGINX product (Round-Robin, Least Connections, Generic Hash, and IP Hash), and adds the Least Time method. All load-balancing methods are extended to operate more efficiently on multi-core servers; the NGINX Plus worker processes share information about load balancing state so that traffic distribution and weights can be more accurately applied.
Content Caching with NGINX Plus
NGINX Plus is used as a content cache, both to accelerate local origin servers and to create edge servers for content delivery networks. Caching can reduce the load on your origin servers by a huge factor, depending on the cacheability of your content and the profile of user traffic.
NGINX Plus can cache content retrieved from upstream HTTP servers and responses returned by FastCGI, SCGI, and uwsgi services.
NGINX Plus extends the content caching capabilities of NGINX by adding support for cache purging and richer visualization of cache status on the live activity monitoring dashboard:
Why Use Content Caching?
Content caching improves the load times of web pages, reduces the load on your upstream servers, and improves availability by using cached content as a backup if your origin servers have failed.
The benefits of content caching include:
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Improved site performance – NGINX Plus serves cached content of all types at the same speed as static content, meaning reduced latency and a more responsive website.
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Increased capacity – NGINX Plus offloads repetitive tasks from your origin servers, freeing up capacity to service more users and run more applications.
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Greater availability – NGINX Plus insulates your users from catastrophic errors by serving up cached content (even if it’s stale) when the origin servers are down.
NGINX Plus and NGINX provide a consolidated solution for your web infrastructure, bringing together an HTTP server for origin content, application gateways for FastCGI and other protocols, and an HTTP proxy for upstream servers. NGINX Plus adds enterprise-grade application load balancing, consolidating the frontend load balancers in your web infrastructure.