Nginx (pronounced ‘engine x’) is an HTTP and reverse proxy server. It is well known for its high performance and stability. It is pretty feature rich and very simple to configure. Nginx hosts nearly 12.18% (22.2M) of active sites across all domains. Nginx uses event-driven architecture to handle requests. When compared to a thread-per-request model, event-driven is highly scalable with a low and predicatble memory footprint.
Front-ending Apache Tomcat with Apache Web Server or IIS is sometimes thought to improve performance. However, performance of Tomcat standalone has already been known to be very good. So why add IIS or Apache web server in front of it? – the answer is scalability and maintenance. Front-ending Tomcat with such web servers allows you to add more instances in case of increased load and also bring down instances for maintenance/upgrades.
This blog shows you end-to-end, step-by-step detailed instructions on how to setup such an environment. It should take you about an hour to configure this setup for yourself. Follow the instructions slowly and carefully to make sure you do not skip/miss any step. Here is a higher level view of the setup.
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