Moving to or adopting to cloud architecture is a process that requires well-thought out planning of application & data, infrastructure and security. So, if you are moving or planning to move to cloud it’s a good time to begin thinking about your application architecture to ensure a good application delivery. Traditionally, most companies use hardware application delivery controllers (ADC) for hosting application on premise. Generally, hardware ADC works well for on-premise deployments but you may have challenges when you move to cloud.

Modern ADC like NGINX Plus is developed keeping cloud scenario in mind. NGINX Plus is lightweight with all the features you need to deliver your applications flawlessly, without forcing you to pay for features you’ll never use. NGINX Plus is available at a fraction of  your hardware ADC cost, with no bandwidth or SSL limits to slow you down.

Here are some cloud architectures that leverage the power of NGINX Plus to ensure delivering your applications flawlessly:

Hybrid Approach

You may like to consider hybrid deployment as a less disruptive approach if you have lot of legacy applications and are not willing to move everything to cloud at once. This approach allows you to use both on premise and cloud services to deliver your applications. Load balancing algorithm of NGINX Plus helps you to send traffic to cloud when all the on premise servers are busy.

NGINX Plus “Least Time” algorithm determines the value by combining – the number to active connections and response time for each server. It then sends the request to the server with the lowest value.

Normally it will tend to send the request to local on premise servers as they have less network latency and responds faster. But then it will start directing request to cloud servers when servers in cloud starts responding more quickly even with network latency.

Load balancing in the region 

Almost all of the cloud vendors today have regional data centers and they provide ‘availability zones’ in each regional data center. Availability zones have their own isolated infrastructure which helps companies to make their applications highly available by replicating it across availability zones. Replicating your applications across multiple availability zones provides high availability within a region. 

In the architecture diagram above, the cloud service provider’s load balancer helps direct traffic across the availability zones. Within each availability zone, NGINX Plus helps load balancing application servers (monolith or micro services based applications) to ensure the flawless application delivery and performance.

Load Balancing across the regions

If you are planning to host your applications in multiple regions which would in turn help move applications closer to the users reducing the impact of network latency, one of the method is to use geographic location-based DNS (GeoDNS) solution. This approach helps sending client request to the data center closest to them.

The above architecture diagram shows combining GeoDNS solution with NGINX Plus to create a well distributed and scalable application delivery mechanism. Here, GeoDNS directs user from city in east region to east region data center, while user requests from city in west region is directed to data center in west region. Within each data center, NGINX Plus helps to distribute incoming traffic across the application servers effectively to ensure flawless application delivery and performance.

So, if you are moving to cloud or planning to move to cloud then it is suggested to reconsider your application delivery strategy to ensure flawless application delivery with no compromise on performance and availability of application delivery.

Sandeep Khuperkar I CTO and Director, Ashnik

Sandeep is the Director and CTO at Ashnik. He brings more than 21 years of Industry experience (most of it spans across Red Hat & IBM India), with 14+ years in open source and building open source and Linux business model. He is on Advisory Board of JJM College of Engineering (Electronics Dept.)  And visiting lecturer with few of Engineering colleges and works towards enabling them on open source technologies. He is author, Enthusiast and community moderator at Opensource.com. He is also member of Open Source Initiative, Linux Foundation and Open Source Consortium Of India.