Weighted round-robin in Nginx - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Configure Weighted Round-Robin Load Balancing in Nginx

📖 Scenario: You are setting up a simple load balancer using Nginx to distribute web traffic across multiple backend servers. Some servers are more powerful, so they should receive more traffic. You will configure weighted round-robin to achieve this.

🎯 Goal: Build an Nginx configuration that uses weighted round-robin to balance requests between three backend servers with different weights.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an upstream block named backend with three servers

Assign weights 3, 2, and 1 to the servers respectively

Configure the server block to proxy requests to the backend upstream

Print the final Nginx configuration to verify the setup

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Weighted round-robin helps balance load efficiently when backend servers have different capacities, improving website performance and reliability.

💼 Career

Understanding Nginx load balancing is essential for DevOps roles managing scalable web applications and infrastructure.

1

Create the upstream block with backend servers

Create an upstream block named backend with these three servers exactly: server1.example.com, server2.example.com, and server3.example.com. Do not add weights yet.

Nginx

# Define the upstream block with three servers
upstream backend {
    # Your code here
}

Need a hint?

Use the upstream directive and list each server inside curly braces.

2

Add weights to the backend servers

Add weights to the servers inside the upstream backend block: assign weight 3 to server1.example.com, weight 2 to server2.example.com, and weight 1 to server3.example.com. Use the syntax server hostname weight=number;.

Nginx

upstream backend {
    # Add weights to each server below
    
}

Need a hint?

Add weight= followed by the number after each server hostname.

3

Configure the server block to use the upstream backend

Create a server block that listens on port 80 and proxies all requests to the backend upstream using proxy_pass http://backend; inside the location / block.

Nginx

upstream backend {
    server server1.example.com weight=3;
    server server2.example.com weight=2;
    server server3.example.com weight=1;
}

# Add server block below

Need a hint?

Use server block with listen 80; and inside location / use proxy_pass http://backend;.

4

Print the final Nginx configuration

Print the entire Nginx configuration to verify the weighted round-robin setup. Use print() to output the configuration as a string exactly as written.

Nginx

# Print the full Nginx configuration below
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print() with the full configuration string including newlines and indentation.