NGINX load balancing with Docker

Once you've tackled the conversion from complex deploy scripts into neat Dockerfile, the next step is to deal with scale. As for most other problems, Docker has a solution for this too; scaling is one of those.

While newer versions of Docker have added native load balancing, it's still quite simplistic. This makes NGINX a better choice for many uses. Since you're already familiar with the workings of NGINX, it's easily adapted to provide load balancing within a Docker environment.

In a larger deployment, we'd use a more formal service discovery tool, such as consul or etcd, in order to provide more granular control. This recipe will simply use the built-in DNS capability of Docker in order to round-robin the requests.

Getting ready

This recipe has been simplified to run on a single VM. In most real-world scenarios, this would be spread across multiple VMs. Here's what our test scenario looks like:

We're using the HTest tool, as covered back in Chapter 8, Load...