Load Balancing Containers in Docker Swarm Mode with NGINX

Docker and other container technologies continue to gain in popularity. We recently surveyed the broad community of NGINX and NGINX Plus users and found that two‑thirds of organizations are either investigating containers, using them in development, or using them in production. Why? Because abstracting your applications from the underlying infrastructure makes developing, distributing, and running software simpler, faster, and more robust than ever before.

But when you move from running your app in a development environment to deploying containers in production, you face new challenges – such as how to effectively run and scale an application across multiple hosts with the performance and uptime that your customers demand.

The latest Docker release, 1.12, supports multihost container orchestration, which simplifies deployment and management of containers across a cluster of Docker hosts. In a complex environment like this, load balancing plays an essential part in delivering your container‑based application with reliability and high performance.