Nginx - TCP balancer

[Kamil Gorlo]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 9:22 PM, Aleksandar Lazic <al-nginx at none.at> wrote:
> Hi Kamil,
>
> On Mit 11.06.2008 21:09, Kamil Gorlo wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I have question about Nginx "features". Is it possible to run Nginx as
>> a transparent load balancer (which works on TCP layer, not HTTP)??
>>
>> My case is that I have 5 of backends (strong, 4 core machines) which
>> communicates with users over HTTPS (it's some kind of authentication
>> service - user sends short https requests, get response, and does not
>> keep connection any more; so user spends only few seconds on this
>> service, but there are many users). Till today I was using simple dns
>> balancing between those machines, but now I need something more
>> powerful.
>>
>> So, I have another 2 machines (this time, they have only single core)
>> which I want to be load balancers. But they cannot work on HTTP layer,
>> as a standard load balancer, because of SSL - they simply does not have
>> resources to do this SSL stuff. My idea is to use some kind of
>> transparent load balancer on those machines - they should only forward
>> requests to backends and all resource consuming work should be done on
>> backends (SSL handshake, etc.).
>>
>> Can Nginx do that? If not, do you know any tools which can work as TCP
>> balancers (I found HAProxy, but haven't tested it)?
>
> No nginx can't do this, but it can be a excellent ssl-backend ;-)

In fact, it is :)

> haproxy can do this for you, from
> http://haproxy.1wt.eu/download/1.3/doc/haproxy-en.txt

Ok, thanks - first test showed that it also has good performance.

[cut]

> Hth
>
> Aleks
>
>

Best regards,
Kamil