Implementing Load Balancing Algorithm in NGINX

Optimizing Performance and Reliability for Your Website

What is Load balancing? Imagine you’re hosting a party and guests keep pouring in through your front door. Some guests arrive alone, while others come in groups. You want to ensure everyone gets a chance to mingle and enjoy themselves without overcrowding any one area. This scenario parallels the challenges faced by web servers managing incoming traffic.

Load balancing is like a traffic management for your web applications. It ensures that incoming requests are distributed efficiently across multiple servers, optimizing resource utilization and improving performance.

In this article, we’ll explore 6 popular load balancing algorithms and demonstrate how to set them up using NGINX.

Round Robin

Round Robin is the default algorithm in NGINX which it sends the same amount of requests to each server. Round Robin is like taking turns at a buffet. Each guest (or in this case, each request) is served in sequence. So, if you have three dishes, each person will get one before the cycle repeats. NGINX implements this algorithm by equally distributing requests among backend servers.