NGINX has introduced new load balancing capabilities to support the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). These new features build on NGINX’s existing Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and HTTP load balancing capabilities as a front-end for a wide range of web and mobile applications.
UDP is emerging as one of the protocols-of-choice for new Internet of Things (IoT) applications due to its low-bandwidth requirements and the ability to provide the high levels of application and Web performance to capitalize on the rise of large volumes of traffic and data generated by the IoT.
With NGINX used as a load balancer and application delivery platform, developers and organizations can ensure their new IoT applications can achieve high performance, security, and scale, and aren’t overloaded by growth and traffic spikes.
The addition of UDP load balancing capabilities will address two key use cases: high availability and horizontal scaling. NGINX offers a highly available and reliable load balancer for UDP servers monitor the state and availability of the application. Should an individual UDP server become overloaded or unavailable, the organization can continue communicating with the load balancer without suffering a costly timeout.
For high-capacity environments when multiple UDP servers are required to share the load generated by clients, NGINX’s load balancing solution spreads that load across those servers. The load balancer itself is aware of all of the UDP servers while allowing the user to only monitor one or two, saving man power and time, and ensuring peak performance for the application.
UDP load balancing is available today via the open source NGINX software repository. Extended management and monitoring capabilities will soon be made available through the commercial application delivery platform, NGINX Plus.