Load Balancing and Reverse Proxy Lab

In this hands-on lab, you'll learn how load balancing and reverse proxies work by building a real load-balanced web application. You'll configure Nginx as both a reverse proxy and load balancer to distribute traffic across multiple backend servers.

You'll implement different load balancing algorithms (round-robin, least connections, IP hash), configure health checks to detect failed servers, and understand session persistence with sticky sessions.

By the end of this lab, you'll understand:

• How to set up multiple backend servers
• Configuring Nginx as a reverse proxy and load balancer
• Load balancing algorithms: Round Robin, Least Connections, IP Hash
• Health checks and automatic failover
• Session persistence (sticky sessions)
• Backend weighting for capacity management
• Zero-downtime deployment patterns