NGINX as an API Gateway
The Complete Guide to Routing, Load Balancing, and Kubernetes Deployment for Modern Microservices
By Shane Larson
About This Book
NGINX handles a third of all websites on the internet. Most people are using a fraction of what it can do.
Properly configured, NGINX does everything a microservices API gateway needs — routing, load balancing, rate limiting, SSL termination, caching, and security hardening — without the complexity, the vendor lock-in, or the cost of dedicated gateway products. The tool you already have is more capable than the tool you're considering paying for.
NGINX as an API Gateway takes you from a fresh installation to a production-hardened gateway, with complete, production-ready configuration examples in every chapter. Not simplified illustrations of what the config could look like — actual configurations that handle edge cases, security requirements, and real-world deployment patterns you can adapt and deploy today.
This book is for you if you are building or operating microservices and need a reliable, performant API gateway, you are evaluating NGINX against Kong, Envoy, Traefik, or managed cloud gateways, or you are migrating from the Ingress NGINX Controller to the Kubernetes Gateway API.
Read a chapter. Adapt the config. Deploy it.
The gateway you need is already installed. This book shows you how to use it.
What You'll Learn
- How to configure NGINX as a full-featured API gateway for microservices architectures
- Routing patterns: upstream blocks, location matching, URL rewriting, WebSocket proxying, and DRY configuration with includes
- Load balancing strategies: round robin, weighted, least connections, IP hash, health checks, and failover
- Rate limiting and abuse prevention: per-IP and per-API-key limits, burst handling, brute force protection
- SSL/TLS termination: Let's Encrypt automation, modern cipher suites, HSTS, OCSP stapling, and mTLS
- Response caching: cache zones, bypass rules, microcaching, stale content serving, and debugging
- Security hardening: CORS, security headers, attack pattern blocking, and request filtering
- API versioning and traffic splitting: canary deployments, blue-green patterns, and A/B testing
- Docker Compose deployments: full gateway + microservices examples with Docker networking
- The Kubernetes Ingress retirement and Gateway API migration — step-by-step with NGINX Gateway Fabric
- Observability: JSON structured logging, request tracing, upstream metrics, and Prometheus integration
- A complete production hardening checklist covering security, performance, resilience, and monitoring
