AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

Introducing a New AWS Quick Start — NGINX Plus on the AWS Cloud in 15 minutes

Editor’s note: There is an updated NGINX Plus on AWS Quick Start that we have highlighted on the APN Blog.

We just published a new AWS Quick Start that automatically deploys NGINX Plus on AWS easily, in about 15 minutes. This new AWS Quick Start was created by Solutions Architects in collaboration with NGINX, Inc., an APN Technology Partner. It is the latest in a series of AWS Quick Starts built with the Partner community to automate the deployment of key workloads on AWS.

NGINX Plus is a complete application delivery platform for the modern web. This platform is built on the open source NGINX, which is a web server and reverse proxy for high-traffic sites that powers over 170 million properties. NGINX Plus provides enterprise-ready features for advanced load balancing, web and mobile acceleration, application security, monitoring, and management.

The new AWS Quick Start uses an AWS CloudFormation template to automatically build the following NGINX Plus environment on AWS:

The AWS Quick Start architecture includes:

  • An Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) that spans two Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone includes two subnets (private and public).
  • In the private subnets, an NGINX Plus load balancer Auto Scaling group to maintain application availability, and to provide automatic scale-up/scale-down according to conditions you define. These two NGINX Plus load balancer instances distribute traffic to the NGINX Plus application instances within the VPC in an active/active scenario.
  • An ELB Classic Load Balancer that provides inbound access to the NGINX Plus load balancer Auto Scaling group via layer 4 load balancing over ports 80 and 8080.
  • In the private subnets, two NGINX Plus application instances that simulate a Multi-AZ web application farm that receives traffic from the NGINX Plus load balancer Auto Scaling group. These instances are named NGINXWebApp1 and NGINXWebApp2.
  • Amazon Route 53 for DNS access to the ELB and NGINXWebApp instances.
  • In the public subnet, a bastion host instance running Amazon Linux for Secure Shell (SSH) access.

Deployment is easy: You subscribe to the NGINX Plus AMI in the AWS Marketplace, set up your AWS account (if you don’t already have one), launch the Quick Start, enter a few parameters, and hit Create. You can then use the URL displayed in the Outputs tab for the stack to test your deployment. The deployment guide provides step-by-step instructions and additional details.

You can use the AWS Quick Start to build your POC or test environment. If you want to customize the default architecture, you can adjust the template settings or use the template as a baseline for your own implementation. Moving the solution to a production environment may require additional configuration.

AWS Quick Starts are automated reference deployments for key workloads on the AWS Cloud. Each AWS Quick Start launches, configures, and runs the AWS compute, network, storage, and other services required to deploy a specific workload on AWS, using our best practices for security and availability. This is the latest in a series of AWS Quick Starts built by AWS in collaboration with APN Partners to automate the deployment of popular products and technologies on AWS.

To get started with NGINX Plus on AWS, use the following resources:

If you’ve reviewed or deployed one of our Quick Starts, please take our survey and let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing from you.