Common Core

Nginx as a Reverse Proxy

Originally developed for the Russian search engine Rambler, Nginx has become the standard for reverse proxy and load balancing of websites and application servers with high traffic. The extremely frugal use of server resources by Nginx also makes this product attractive for internal use. To install on my CentOS 8 example system, I typed:

sudo dnf install nginx

Although the configuration files have a different format, the minimum configuration required is the same as for Apache. You will find this information in the Microsoft documentation [6]. Again, further refinements like context switches, TLS bridging, and so on require in-depth Nginx knowledge and must be documented.

Conclusions

In recent years, Microsoft has opened up considerably to the open source community. The ability to run .NET Core on Linux is one example. With the open source and platform-independent framework, you can provide web applications on Windows and Linux from your familiar development environment. The ASP.NET knowledge that you have acquired so far through the development of your tools will benefit you here.

Depending on the security and performance requirements of your applications, you can use the native Kestrel web worker directly or publish it behind a full-fledged web server operated as a reverse proxy (IIS on Windows, Nginx or Apache on Linux). Because all of these integration scenarios require loading NuGet packages, in addition to the project templates, your development workstation should have access to the Internet, at least temporarily.