Editor – This post announces the initial version of the NGINX Plus on the AWS Cloud Quick Start, which has been replaced by a new version with more features, including support for Auto Scaling.
For details, see Announcing New Autoscaling Support with NGINX Plus on AWS Cloud Quick Start.
Today we’re pleased to announce the joint release with Amazon Web Services (AWS) of the NGINX Plus on the AWS Cloud Quick Start reference deployment, publicly available on the AWS Community Quick Starts landing page and the AWS QuickStart Github repository. The NGINX Plus on the AWS Cloud Quick Start is a turn‑key solution you can use to easily build, configure, and deploy a fully functional, highly available application environment on AWS. The Quick Start is a quick way to spin up an entire NGINX Plus load balancing and application delivery infrastructure with minimal effort.
AWS Quick Start reference deployments are automated solutions that use CloudFormation templates to launch, configure, and run the AWS services – such as compute, network, and storage – you need to deploy specific workloads on AWS. They are designed to kick‑start fully functional solutions on AWS while giving you the freedom to customize as needed for your specific environments.
The NGINX Plus on the AWS Cloud Quick Start deploys four NGINX Plus instances in a scalable active‑active load‑balancing infrastructure for delivering a sample PHP application. All four instances are running on NGINX Plus Amazon Linux AMIs: two instances each run together with a PHP application server and the other two are HA load balancers. The AMIs can run on various machine types and are billed hourly, inclusive of both the machine cost and the NGINX Plus licensing costs.
This Quick Start highlights the following AWS and NGINX Plus solutions and features:
- Amazon CloudFormation template, which you can customize during launch to match your environmental needs
- 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
Get started now by deploying the NGINX Plus on the AWS Cloud Quick Start, available at both the AWS Community Quick Starts landing page and the AWS QuickStart Github repository.
Note: While the Quick Start deploys a full NGINX load balancing and application server sample environment built on AWS, it is designed as a proof of concept (PoC) development solution and not intended for immediate use with application workloads in production. Moving the Quick Start out of development and into production may require additional configuration. For more information on configuring NGINX Plus, please refer to the NGINX Plus Admin Guide and Harness the Power of NGINX Plus on Amazon Web Services. The Quick Start also utilizes NGINX Plus AMIs, licensed software that will initiate immediate billing to your AWS EC2 account.