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Web Server Load Balancing with NGINX Plus

At NGINX Conf 2019, the Arm team showcased the cost savings you can achieve by deploying NGINX Plus on Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) A1 instances powered by the AWS Graviton processor, which has 64‑bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS. Recently, AWS introduced the Graviton2 processor and launched new M6g, C6g, and R6g EC2 instance types powered by it.

These new instances offer significantly better price‑performance than current x86‑based instances for a broad spectrum of workloads including application servers, microservices, high‑performance computing, electronic design automation, gaming, open source databases, and in‑memory caches. These instances also have very broad software support, so you can run them on any supported OS and container type to leverage AWS tools and services. Many customers are already deploying their production applications on these new instance types.

Our engineering team conducted thorough testing of NGINX Plus on M6g and x86‑based M5 instances of four different sizes. We configured NGINX Plus for two use cases – reverse proxy server and API gateway – and in both cases tested with and without HS256 JWT‑based authentication. M6g instances performed an average of 54% better than M5 instances across the four instance sizes. In addition, customers can achieve 20% cost savings with M6g instances.

The following graph for the reverse proxy use case with JWT‑based authentication shows the percentage performance gain for M6g instances with the four tested instance sizes.

For more details, check out our white paper with detailed analysis and results showing the performance gains and cost savings over different scenarios. The whitepaper also includes detailed configuration of the test setup and provides guidelines for deploying NGINX Plus on AWS.

Instances powered by Arm‑based AWS Graviton2 processors are well suited for your next NGINX Plus deployment. You can seamlessly migrate from your existing instances to the new Graviton2‑powered Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) published by NGINX.

Find out more about Arm Neoverse
Learn more about Amazon EC2 M6g Instances

For more information and to engage with Arm directly for your deployment, please email us.

Want to try NGINX Plus on an Amazon EC2 M6g instance? Start your free 30-day trial today or contact NGINX to discuss your use cases.

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About The Author

Bhumik Patel

Director, Software Ecosystem

About F5 NGINX

F5, Inc. is the company behind NGINX, the popular open source project. We offer a suite of technologies for developing and delivering modern applications. Together with F5, our combined solution bridges the gap between NetOps and DevOps, with multi-cloud application services that span from code to customer.

Learn more at nginx.com or join the conversation by following @nginx on Twitter.