If you are hosting your website on Amazon Web Services, Nginx is the best way to set up your server. Nginx is a web server that can be used for many different things, and it’s perfect for running websites on AWS. This article will give you an overview of what Nginx does and how it works with Amazon Web Services. It will also teach you how to set up Nginx on aws so that you can get your site live!
Table of Contents
What is NGINX and how does it work?
NGINX is a web server that has been around for quite some time. NGINX is open-source, which means it’s easy to use and modify as needed. It also works on Linux (which we’ll talk more about later), but Nginx was originally developed in C++ to be fast and efficient. nginx can process up to 12,000 requests per second! Nginx does not work like other servers; rather than handling one request at a time, Nginx handles many connections simultaneously by threading them behind the scenes and serving them out of order without having any effect on performance or latency. This makes Nginx an excellent choice for high-traffic websites where speed matters most.
How to use NGINX on AWS?
You can use Nginx as the web server in EC2, or you can install Nginx on your own LightSail instance.
Installing Nginx on AWS is pretty simple and straightforward. Here I list down the steps to set up Nginx on Amazon Linux 2 Operating system.
-First, create an EC2 instance with Amazon Linux 2 as the AMI.
-Then update the YUM packages by running this command.
sudo yum update -y-In Amazon Linux 2, there is a tool called amazon-linux-extras, which we will use to install Nginx. The command is given below.
sudo amazon-linux-extras install nginx1-Once you install the Nginx server, then start the Nginx and enable it for auto-restart if the system reboots.
sudo systemctl start nginx
sudo systemctl enable nginx-Optionally you can install PHP or NodeJS as the scripting language.
sudo amazon-linux-extras enable php8.0
sudo yum install php php-cli php-mbstring php-mysqlnd php-xmlBenefits of using NGINX on AWS
Nginx is the fastest web server at the moment.
Nginx can handle a lot of requests per second, which makes it perfect for high-load websites.
It is also well documented and supported by many programmers around the world. nginx wiki page has full documentation on setting up Nginx to work with Amazon Linux AMI.
Drawbacks of using NGINX on AWS
Even though Nginx is fast, Nginx can’t handle as many requests per second (RPS) as Apache.
Nginx also doesn’t have the same level of integration with other software that Apache has.
In addition to this Nginx does not include an FTP or web server so it can only serve static files from its document root directory and needs a way to manage dynamic content such as PHP scripts.
Another drawback is Nginx’s inability to use SSL certificates for encryption by default. It supports TLS which uses session keys instead of encrypting all traffic between clients and servers using private/public key pairs like OpenSSL, but there are ways around these drawbacks if they’re something you consider when looking at your options.
Conclusion
Setting up your website on Amazon Web Services can be a complicated process. We’ll walk you through the steps of setting up Nginx for your site, which will allow you to develop websites and web applications easier than ever before. Leave a comment below if you have any questions about this process or want us to address anything specific in our next blog post!
