Exploring: How does Nginx Plus Looks Like?

Apache HTTP is still leading in web server market share but looks like Nginx is going to take over pretty soon.

Nginx is known for its performance and leading in top 10K and 100K sites.

Nginx is an open source web server, and it’s fantastic.

It integrates well with many backends, application servers. If you are working on Nginx, then you might be aware of Nginx Plus, a commercial version of Nginx.

Nginx Plus got more features than Nginx (as you can guess).

Ex:

• Session persistence to ensure requests are routed to same upstream server
• High-availability clustering to avoid single point of failures (SPOF)
• Active health checks to stop sending request to faulty servers
• Discover services using DNS
• A full-featured load balancer
• More control on cache
• Inbuilt monitoring for debugging, resources utilization, troubleshooting
• Single sign-on
• WAF dynamic module
• Bandwidth controls for Mp4 streaming
• and many more…

Nginx Plus is available for the following distribution.

• RHEL/CentOS
• Amazon Linux
• Oracle Linux
• FreeBSD
• SUSE
• Ubuntu
• debian

and also on the following IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service)

• Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Microsoft Azure

Installing Nginx Plus

Nginx offers 30-days FREE trial, so if you want to explore, you can download the trial copy.

The following I’ve tested on Google Cloud

There are two ways to install Nginx Plus.

One is manual which is explained here and secondly is through the script.

Let’s use the script way as its easy.

• Login to server with the root
• Execute the below scripts

wget https://cs.nginx.com/static/install-nginx && chmod +x install-nginx 
./install-nginx #hash key given by Nginx

• Replace red color text with one-time hash key provided by Nginx

Ex:

[root@instance-1 ~]# ./install-nginx 148740a5769c640b3233406d04c5b58e
This script will install NGINX Plus
Do you want to install nginx-plus for centos 7? [y/n]: y
2017-12-03 07:49:37 URL:https://cs.nginx.com/otl/148740a5769c640b3233406d04c5b58e/cert [1334/1334] -> "/etc/ssl/nginx/nginx-repo.crt" [1]
2017-12-03 07:49:38 URL:https://cs.nginx.com/otl/148740a5769c640b3233406d04c5b58e/private_key [1708/1708] -> "/etc/ssl/nginx/nginx-repo.key" [1]
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
nginx-plus                                                                                                                              | 2.9 kB  00:00:00     
nginx-plus/x86_64/primary_db                                                                                                            | 137 kB  00:00:01     
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * base: mirrors.xmission.com
 * epel: mirror.hmc.edu
 * extras: centos.s.uw.edu
 * updates: mirrors.syringanetworks.net
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package nginx-plus.x86_64 0:1.13.4-1.el7.ngx will be installed
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Dependencies Resolved
===============================================================================================================================================================
 Package                              Arch                             Version                                      Repository                            Size
===============================================================================================================================================================
Installing:
 nginx-plus                           x86_64                           1.13.4-1.el7.ngx                             nginx-plus                           2.9 M
Transaction Summary
===============================================================================================================================================================
Install  1 Package
Total download size: 2.9 M
Installed size: 7.2 M
Downloading packages:
nginx-plus-1.13.4-1.el7.ngx.x86_64.rpm                                                                                                  | 2.9 MB  00:00:20     
Running transaction check
Running transaction test
Transaction test succeeded
Running transaction
  Installing : nginx-plus-1.13.4-1.el7.ngx.x86_64                                                                                                          1/1 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you for using NGINX!
Please find the documentation for NGINX Plus here:
/usr/share/nginx/html/nginx-modules-reference.pdf
NGINX Plus is proprietary software. EULA and License information:
/usr/share/doc/nginx-plus/
For support information, please see:
https://www.nginx.com/support/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Verifying  : nginx-plus-1.13.4-1.el7.ngx.x86_64                                                                                                          1/1 
Installed:
  nginx-plus.x86_64 0:1.13.4-1.el7.ngx                                                                                                                         
Complete!
[root@instance-1 ~]#

That was easy!

Let’s start the Nginx and verify the installation by accessing server IP.

service nginx start

and as you can see, it’s success!

Stop/Start Nginx

Procedure to stop and start remain same as Nginx open source.

service nginx stop #to stop
service nginx start #to start
service nginx status #to check the status
service nginx restart #to restart

Real-time Monitoring

As mentioned earlier, Plus provide live activity monitoring where you can check detailed metrics.

Ex:

• Current and total requests
• Requests per second
• Response by HTTP status code
• Traffic data size by sent and received
• Upstream requests details

Take a look at the demo site

Nginx Plus looks perfect solution for software-based load-balancing, to improve web performance, serve a large number of visitors concurrently.

Do you like Nginx? Give a try to Nginx Plus; you will love it!