NGINX in Production: Build Secure, High-Performance Application Delivery with Reverse Proxying, Load Balancing, API Gateways, Docker, Kubernetes Gatew

By Alira Vexel

Build, secure, automate, and operate NGINX as a complete production application-delivery platform.

NGINX is no longer used only for serving websites. Modern engineering teams rely on it for reverse proxying, load balancing, TLS termination, API gateway services, traffic management, caching, container platforms, Kubernetes, security enforcement, and observability.

NGINX in Production is a practical, implementation-driven guide to designing and operating secure, high-performance NGINX infrastructure across Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, and modern DevOps environments.

Instead of presenting isolated directives and theoretical examples, this book takes you through the complete production lifecycle: architecture, installation, configuration, deployment, security, performance testing, failure recovery, automation, monitoring, migration, and disaster recovery.

You will learn how to:

- Install and configure production-ready NGINX on Linux
- Understand the event-driven architecture, workers, connections, and request-processing model
- Build secure reverse proxies for multiple applications and services
- Configure host-based and path-based routing
- Automate HTTPS certificates with Let's Encrypt
- Harden TLS and support HTTP/2, HTTP/3, QUIC, and mutual TLS
- Deliver static websites, PHP-FPM, Node.js, Python, Java, and .NET applications
- Proxy WebSocket and gRPC services correctly
- Build highly available HTTP, TCP, and UDP load-balancing platforms
- Configure passive health handling, session persistence, and controlled retries
- Improve performance with worker tuning, buffering, compression, keepalive, caching, and kernel optimization
- Create secure API gateways for REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and WebSocket workloads
- Implement authentication, authorization, rate limiting, access controls, and security headers
- Monitor NGINX with Prometheus and Grafana
- Centralize logs with Loki and Grafana Alloy
- Implement distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry
- Build hardened NGINX containers with Docker and Docker Compose
- Deploy NGINX Gateway Fabric with Kubernetes Gateway API
- Work with GatewayClass, Gateway, HTTPRoute, GRPCRoute, TCPRoute, TLSRoute, and ReferenceGrant
- Automate infrastructure with Ansible, Terraform, Helm, Kustomize, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Argo CD
- Perform rolling deployments, canary releases, GitOps delivery, and rollback
- Migrate from Apache, legacy reverse proxies, and retired community Ingress-NGINX deployments
- Troubleshoot TLS failures, 502 and 504 errors, rejected Gateway API routes, container networking problems, and Kubernetes service failures
- Design backup, restore, capacity-planning, incident-response, and disaster-recovery procedures

Each chapter follows a practical operational workflow:

WHY → HOW → IMPLEMENT → BREAK IT → FIX IT → VALIDATE IT

You will not only learn how to make NGINX work. You will learn how to determine whether it is secure, observable, scalable, recoverable, and ready for real production traffic.

Whether you are deploying your first secure reverse proxy, replacing an older web server, building an API gateway, modernizing Kubernetes traffic management, or operating a multi-node enterprise platform, NGINX in Production provides the architecture, configurations, workflows, troubleshooting methods, and operational practices required to do it properly.

Build beyond a basic web server.

Build an NGINX platform that is secure, fast, observable, automated, highly available, and ready for production

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HH9FLDLW
• ISBN13: 9798170915989
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 372 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 8.5" x 11.0"