New Auto Scaling Support for NGINX Plus on AWS

By Alan Murphy, Technical Manager, Business Development at NGINX, Inc.

An update to the NGINX Plus on AWS Quick Start includes full support for handling Auto Scaling events on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). We are pleased to share that staff from AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner NGINX, Inc., and Solutions Architects from Amazon Web Services (AWS) collaborated on the update.

See the NGINX Plus on AWS Quick Start >>

The NGINX Plus on AWS Quick Start uses customizable AWS CloudFormation templates to automate design, configuration, and setup tasks, and deploys NGINX Plus on AWS in less than 30 minutes. It’s designed to kick-start application migrations by deploying a turn-key NGINX Plus application delivery infrastructure.

The updated AWS Quick Start enables you to spin up an entire NGINX Plus load-balancing and application delivery infrastructure with minimal effort, and demonstrates best practices when using NGINX Plus to manage application traffic on AWS.

The update includes the following features:

• Nginx-asg-sync integration software, which monitors Auto Scaling groups, and adds or removes web application instances as necessary from the NGINX Plus environment, based on your configured settings
• Auto Scaling groups for the NGINX Plus instances, with configurable desired capacity, minimum size, and maximum size settings
• Auto Scaling groups for the NGINX web applications, with configurable desired capacity, minimum size, and maximum size settings
• Support for Auto Scaling policies for the NGINX Plus instances
• Infrastructure improvements, including Linux bastion hosts in an Auto Scaling group and enhanced AWS Quick Start portability

While some features for Auto Scaling front-end traffic are available only in NGINX Plus, we have demonstrated in the AWS Quick Start how to manage application scaling with minimal cost by utilizing custom-built NGINX OSS images as the application images.

This AWS Quick Start utilizes Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for NGINX Plus. Users will need to subscribe to the AMI before deploying the Quick Start.

Get started by deploying the NGINX Plus on AWS Quick Start, and see the Deployment Guide for step-by-step instructions.

Figure 1 – This AWS Quick Start sets up a highly available, secure AWS environment, and launches NGINX Plus automatically into an AWS configuration of your choice.