Nginx Reverse Proxy and Load Balancing Demonstration

This repository contains a containerized environment demonstrating advanced Nginx traffic management. It routes traffic to two different backend stacks: .NET 8 and Java 21 (Spring Boot).

Technical Features

1. Traffic Routing Logic

The Nginx configuration implements three concurrent routing methods:

• Header-based: Uses a map directive on the X-App-Type header to choose the upstream.
• Path-based: location blocks for /dotnet/ and /java/ using rewrite to strip prefixes before passing to backends.
• Virtual Hosts: Separate server blocks for dotnet.localhost and java.localhost.

2. Load Balancing

Upstream groups are defined for both application stacks, distributing traffic across multiple container instances (dotnet-1, dotnet-2 and java-1, java-2).

3. Rate Limiting

A shared memory zone (req_limit) is defined to restrict clients to 20 requests per second, protecting the backend services from burst traffic.

Project Structure

• nginx/nginx.conf: Main configuration file for routing, upstreams, and rate limiting.
• dotnet/: Source and Dockerfile for the .NET 8 "Mirror" API.
• java/: Source and Dockerfile for the Spring Boot "Mirror" API.
• demonstration.sh: A shell script to verify load balancing and rate limiting behavior via curl.

Deployment

1. Build and Start:

docker compose up -d --build

2. Verify Routing:

• Header: curl -H "X-App-Type: java" http://localhost
• Path: curl http://localhost/dotnet/
• Host: curl -H "Host: java.localhost" http://localhost