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Scaling Out With Docker and Nginx
Number 10 of the 12 Commandments states that our development environment should be as similar as possible to what we have in production. Not doing so can lead to many predicaments when debugging critical, live issues.
One important step in this regard would be to mimic a standard distributed production setup: a load-balancer sitting in front of multiple backend server instances, dividing incoming HTTP traffic among them.
This article is not an introduction to Docker, Compose or Nginx. But rather a guide to setting up the distributed system described above, assuming we’ve installed Docker and are familiar with images, containers etc. I’ll try to provide enough information about Compose and Nginx so we can get our hands dirty without succumbing to the noise that normally goes with them.
Each of our backend server instances (simple Node.js servers) and the Nginx load-balancer will be hosted inside Docker-based Linux containers. If we stick to 3 backend servers and 1 load-balancer we’ll need to manage/provision 4 Docker containers, for which Compose is a great tool.
What We Want
