Watch on demand: www.nginx.com/resources/webinars/three-ways-to-automate-with-nginx-and-nginx-plus The process of deploying applications in many organizations today is slowed down by manual processes. These manual processes create extra work for developers and operations teams, cause unnecessary delays, and increase the time it takes to get new features and critical bug and security fixes into the hands of customers. Automating common tasks – using tools, scripts, and other techniques – is a great way to improve operational efficiency and accelerate the rollout of new features and apps. The potential improvements of automation are impressive. With the proper components in place, some companies have been able to deploy new code to production more than 50 times per day, creating a more stable application and increasing customer satisfaction. High-performing DevOps teams turn to open source NGINX and NGINX Plus to build fully automated, self-service pipelines that developers use to effortlessly push out new features, security patches, bug fixes, and whole new applications to production with no manual intervention. * Best practices for continuous delivery and automated deployments * How to quickly and easily deploy new features or bug fixes into production with the push of a button * Techniques to orchestrate and manage your NGINX-powered infrastructure using tools like Ansible, Chef, and Puppet * How to use Jenkins to modify your NGINX configuration * Methods to automate the discovery of new services using NGINX Plus

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3 Ways to Automate with NGINX and NGINX Plus

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Floyd Smith
Technical Marketing Writer at NGINX, Inc.
Formerly:
- Apple, Alta Vista, Google, and more
- Author of multiple books on technology
Kunal Pariani
Technical Solutions Architect at NGINX, Inc.
Formerly:
- Zimbra, Motorola, Cisco
- Intern at JPL - yes, a rocket scientist!

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• First OSS release in 2004
• Company founded in 2011
• VC-backed by industry leaders
• 165+ million open source users
• 800+ customers
• 90+ employees
Igor Sysoev, NGINX creator and founder

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“How long would it take your organization to
deploy a change that involves just one
single line of code?”
– Mary Poppendieck,
Lean software development guru

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Deploying New
App Versions
1

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Modifying open source NGINX configuration
1. SSH into NGINX server
2. Edit configuration file to add/remove servers
3. nginx –t && nginx –s reload
Problems with this approach:
1. Have to manually SSH into each server every time
2. Not scalable with frequent changes and/or long lived connections

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NGINX Plus HTTP-Based API -- Configuration
upstream backend {
zone backend 64k;
server app-server-v1;
}
server {
listen 8080; # Listen on a local port
location /upstream_conf {
allow 10.0.0.0/8; # Allow access only from LAN
deny all; # Deny everyone else
upstream_conf;
}
}

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NGINX Plus HTTP-Based API -- Commands
• Add new server
# curl 'http://localhost:8080/upstream_conf?add=&upstream=backend&server=app-
server-v2’
• List servers
# curl http://localhost:8080/upstream_conf?upstream=backend
server app-server-v1; # id=0
server app-server-v2; # id=1
• Mark existing server to draining state
# curl http://localhost:8080/upstream_conf?upstream=backend&id=0&drain=1
• Monitor the Live activity monitoring dashboard till the active connections count for this
server reaches 0
• Remove existing server
# curl 'http://localhost:8080/upstream_conf?remove=&upstream=backend&id=0'

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NGINX Plus Health Checks
Alternative method that involves no modification of NGINX at all
1. Configure health check to monitor if a file, such as healthcheck.html, exists
1. Delete or rename healthcheck.html
1. Make changes to production server
1. Recreate or rename healthcheck.html
1. Optional slow_start to gently bring the server back online

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Orchestration and
Management
2

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Orchestration and Management

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Orchestration and Management

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Service Discovery
3

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• Key component of service-oriented or microservices architecture which
has dynamic instances
• Process of discovering the endpoint addresses to which the requests
need to be routed
• Automation enables dynamic addition or removal from the
load-balanced pool as and when they get created or destroyed
• No modifications to the NGINX configuration, reducing complexity
What It Is and Why It Matters

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16
• The DNS resolver in NGINX points to the DNS interface of a service
discovery tool like Consul, etcd, or ZooKeeper
• NGINX requests DNS A records to get all the IP addresses associated
with the domain name, and starts load balancing traffic across these
addresses
• NGINX honors the TTL in the DNS response, or you can override it using
the valid parameter to the resolver directive
DNS for Service Discovery with NGINX

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• Open source NGINX does not support DNS SRV
records
– NGINX Plus only
• Port numbers have to be statically defined
• Not suitable for microservices environments
Limitations and Caveats

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• NGINX Plus can periodically re-resolve DNS SRV
records from the service registry
• Additional service and resolve parameters to the
server directive (NGINX Plus only)
• Makes it a zero configuration deployment and allows
scaling with ease
DNS SRV-Based Service Discovery with
NGINX Plus

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resolver <dns-server-ip> valid=10s;
upstream backend {
zone backend 64k;
server backends.example.com service=http resolve;
}
server {
location / {
proxy_pass http://$backend;
}
}
• The service parameter sets the service name and enables resolving of
DNS SRV records
• The resolve parameter monitors changes in SRV records and modifies
upstream configuration automatically without the need for a reload
Example of NGINX Plus Configuration

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• DNS server either needs to be highly
available or have a backup server
• An alternative to DNS for service discovery
with NGINX Plus is the on-the-fly
reconfiguration API
Caveats

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Demo
(github.com/nginxinc/NGINX-Demos/tree/master/consul-dns-srv-demo)

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– Dan Chamberlain,
Principal Architect
READ CASE STUDY

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1. On-the-fly reconfiguration API & active health checks
with NGINX Plus enable automated deployments
1. Deploying NGINX and NGINX Plus with Ansible,
Chef, or Puppet makes it easier to manage large
production deployments
1. DNS SRV-based service discovery with NGINX Plus
reduces complexity and allows for greater scalability
with microservices-based apps
Summary

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Resources
1. Ansible blog post
2. Puppet NGINX management module
3. Chef blog post
4. Service Discovery for NGINX Plus w/DNS SRV Records
5. Bluestem Brands case study

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Q & A

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Thank you!