Is Nginx obsolete now that we have Amazon CloudFront?

#1

Post by peterbe » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 8:29 PM UTC

Is Nginx obsolete now that we have Amazon CloudFront?
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Re: Is Nginx obsolete now that we have Amazon CloudFront?

#2

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 9:49 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Is Nginx obsolete now that we have Amazon CloudFront?

#3

Post by gojomo » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 9:55 PM UTC

More generally: once you adopt any of the various schemes for having a inbound proxy/front-end cache (Fastly, CloudFlare, CloudFront, or an in-house varnish/squid/etc), are all the optimizing habits of moving static assets to a dedicated server now superfluous?

I think those optimizing habits are now obsolete: best practice is to have a front-end cache.

A corollary is that we usually needn't worry about a dynamic framework serving large static assets: the front-end cache ensures it happens rarely.

Unfortunately it's still the doctrine of some projects that a production project will always offload static-serving. So for example, the Django docs are filled with much traditional discouragement around using the staticfiles serving app in production, including vague 'this is insecure' intimations. In fact, once you're using a front-end cache, there's little speed/efficiency reason to avoid that practice. And, if it is specifically supected to be insecure, any such insecurity should to be fixed rather than overlooked simply because "it's not used in production".

Re: Is Nginx obsolete now that we have Amazon CloudFront?

#4

Post by banana_bread » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 9:57 PM UTC

CloudFront is pretty good, just make sure you are able to config your asset source in one line. Otherwise you have to use a tool to invalidate the cloudfront cache frequently during dev and it's not instant.

Re: Is Nginx obsolete now that we have Amazon CloudFront?

#5

Post by devmach » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 9:58 PM UTC

Sure it's obsolete, who needs databases and live, chancing data. All we need is a static pages. Besides who needs to build his own infrastructure, it's 2012 right ? Let's buy it.

Re: Is Nginx obsolete now that we have Amazon CloudFront?

#6

Post by georgebarnett » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 10:02 PM UTC

I was once told by somebody wise that if a post asks a question, then the answer is usually no.

e.g.: Is Mountain Lion going to kill Windows 8? .. etc.

Re: Is Nginx obsolete now that we have Amazon CloudFront?

#7

Post by meritt » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 10:07 PM UTC

When you're only using nginx as a CDN, then yes another CDN can replace it.

nginx can do a lot more than serve static files.

Re: Is Nginx obsolete now that we have Amazon CloudFront?

#8

Post by sirn » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 10:07 PM UTC

georgebarnett wrote: post #6

I was once told by somebody wise that if a post asks a question, then the answer is usually no. e.g.: Is Mountain Lion going to kill Windows 8? .. etc.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines[1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines

Re: Is Nginx obsolete now that we have Amazon CloudFront?

#9

Post by eli » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 10:19 PM UTC

banana_bread wrote: post #4

CloudFront is pretty good, just make sure you are able to config your asset source in one line. Otherwise you have to use a tool to invalidate the cloudfront cache frequently during dev and it's not instant.

Note that you can now configure CloudFront to take query strings into account when caching files. Tweaking the query string is basically instant, unlike waiting for the invalidation tool...

Re: Is Nginx obsolete now that we have Amazon CloudFront?

#10

Post by jeffbarr » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 10:23 PM UTC

devmach wrote: post #5

Sure it's obsolete, who needs databases and live, chancing data. All we need is a static pages. Besides who needs to build his own infrastructure, it's 2012 right ? Let's buy it.

CloudFront can do a lot more than simply serve up static data.