Nginx

Rails on AWS: Do you need nginx between Puma and ALB?

When I set up Rails on AWS, I usually use the following pattern:

(CloudFront) → ALB → Puma

I was wondering: Is it always necessary to put nginx between the ALB and Puma server?

My theory behind not using nginx is that because it has its own queue (while the Classic Load Balancer had a very limited “surge queue”, the ALB does not have such a queue), it will help in getting responses back to the user (trading for increased latency) while hindering metrics used for autoscaling and choosing what backend to route the request to (such as Rejected Connection Count).

Moved!

September 8, 2013

Just writing to let you know that I’ve switched servers for this blog! I’ve been meaning to get this on to a faster server that I have control over for awhile, and I finally got around to doing it.

For those of you who are curious, this site is being served by WordPress Multisite, on a Sakura 2G VPS.

And because everyone likes talking about stacks:

Stack.

Kidding.

That’s it! There is some moderate caching in most layers (WordPress Object Cache, APC, NGINX, etc), but nothing too drastic. It’s much faster now than it was on the previous server - we’ll see how this one holds up.