Nginx Inc. is augmenting the commercial version of its widely-used Web server with new functionality meant to help organizations address the growing demand placed on their cloud applications. The most significant improvement is under the hood, in the way that traffic is handled.

The enhanced load balancing algorithm introduced with Nginx Plus 6 factors latency and utilization into the distribution of the work, routing requests to the least-busy servers in the data center nearest to the source of the traffic. That speeds response times and helps implementations run more efficiently, thereby strengthening the main operational argument for using the technology over the leading alternative, Apache.

Organizations can take advantage of the improved load balancing functionality not only for their regular HTTP-based workloads but also for real-time services like messaging software operating one layer down the stack, thanks to the newly enhanced TCP support. Nginx now provides the ability to handle encrypted connections that use the protocol, store operational data on requests and check for failures.

Administrators can see if something is not functioning properly on the complementary monitoring built into the software, which has also been enhanced as part of the update to display a more granular view of the supporting infrastructure. That is achieved through filtering capabilities that can help distinguish HTTP traffic from TCP traffic and show the status of a particular application or server group, among other metrics.

That’s handy for narrowing down problems in large-scale environments where finding an issue can in itself take a considerable time investment to accomplish manually. But that’s typically still dwarfed by the amount of work needed to resolve the failure, which Nginx Plus 6 also promises to address through the inclusion of the open-source Keepalived utility.

The integration provides the option of implementing the software in a paired high-availability configuration wherein traffic destined for a malfunctioning instance is automatically redirected to a secondary node. That kills two birds with one stone, freeing up administrators to spend their time on more gainful endeavors while speeding recovery times.

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