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Is Nginx obsolete now that we have Amazon CloudFront?

peterbe.com

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

#51

Post by ksec »

kiwidrew wrote: post #45
peterwwillis wrote: post #43

How does this shit make it to the front page? First and foremost, everyone needs caching. It's what makes computers fast. That RAM you have? Cache. The memory in your CPU? Cache. The memory in your hard drive? Cache. Your filesystem has a cache. Your browser has a cache. Your DNS resolver has a cache. Your web server's reverse proxy [should] have a cache. Your database [should] have a cache. Every place that you can…

But if the CDN is serving your static assets, your origin webserver only has to generate them once [1] to populate the CDN. It almost doesn't matter how long this takes. And this works well enough that you don't need to bother setting up an Nginx or Apache instance at all . And furthermore, you don't have to copy your static files anywhere -- just use your framework's built-in webserver for everything! This greatly s…

I wonder if anyone actually use the framework's built-in webserver for everything! Sounds Great and i wonder what happens in practice. Anyone know of any real world usage on this?

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

#52

Post by devmach »

peterbe wrote: post #25
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.

Is this just an odd joke? Of course you need a database. If you need to build a toaster, you don't need to build an iron smelting plant. Certain things other folks are better at taking care of.

> Is this just an odd joke? Of course you need a database.

Looks like we need a sarcasm alert on HN, like spoiler alerts :)

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

#53

Post by devmach »

mnutt wrote: post #34
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.

This misses his point that originally he had app nginx user, then he added cloudfront so he had app nginx cloudfront user. At that point is nginx really serving much purpose? I think for the average use case the answer is no, nginx doesn't buy you much. However nginx is a lot more flexible than cloudfront, so if you have more complicated caching rules and such nginx is a perfect fit.

It's only an average use case if you're blogger and use disqus for comments. For most dynamic web applications we need more flexible caching methods and we need to able to change/update cached part on our side.

Don't get me wrong : cloudfront is a cool tech and obviously useful too but a bold claim like " we don't need nginx ( or any performance oriented web server ) because we have cloudfront " is just the very wrong way of thinking.

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

#54

Post by ldng »

alexgartrell wrote: post #46
peterwwillis wrote: post #43

How does this shit make it to the front page? First and foremost, everyone needs caching. It's what makes computers fast. That RAM you have? Cache. The memory in your CPU? Cache. The memory in your hard drive? Cache. Your filesystem has a cache. Your browser has a cache. Your DNS resolver has a cache. Your web server's reverse proxy [should] have a cache. Your database [should] have a cache. Every place that you can…

> How does this shit make it to the front page? Obviously the title was a little ridiculous, but I up-voted it, because it's a novel idea. If you're planning to have almost all of your static assets hosted from the CDN (which is pretty reasonable for almost everyone) then why bother with a super high-throughput low-latency web server if the only purpose is to occasionally refill the CDN? If you end up thrashing the C…

I think it still worth it. You can't have 100% availability. Even AWS sometimes fails. It's then just a matter of changing DNS record and have your server(s) handle the load in some kind of degraded mode.

Peripheral but somewhat relevant, at work, we don't upload photos immediately to S3. We have to pre-process them but as soon as they are ready, we show them to the customer serving then locally. And only then upload them to S3.

I treat a CDN as a cache, great to have but I wouldn't exclusively rely on it. For whatever reason, you might need to degrade or show results asap, you can't do that if the CDN is the primary source.

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

#55

Post by ldng »

ksec wrote: post #51
kiwidrew wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if the CDN is serving your static assets, your origin webserver only has to generate them once [1] to populate the CDN. It almost doesn't matter how long this takes. And this works well enough that you don't need to bother setting up an Nginx or Apache instance at all . And furthermore, you don't have to copy your static files anywhere -- just use your framework's built-in webserver for everything! This greatly s…

I wonder if anyone actually use the framework's built-in webserver for everything! Sounds Great and i wonder what happens in practice. Anyone know of any real world usage on this?

Sounds great except all the framework with built-in webserver advice _against_ using them on production server, at very least for security reason.

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

#56

Post by StavrosK »

todsul wrote: post #47
StavrosK wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, that looks very interesting, but I've had Varnish serve 100k requests on a small (512 MB RAM) VPS without me actually noticing (I only found out when Google Analytics had a spike the size of a mountain). Can nginx do that? It sounds like this solution wouldn't really be able to, having to go through Lua and all, but nginx is an all-around very solid piece of software too, so I wonder...

Nginx can handle much higher loads than Varnish in many situations. Check this out for a look at Nginx's architecture: http://www.aosabook.org/en/nginx.html

I have read that, but what are those situations? I really doubt claims of "much higher" performance, Varnish is very, very performant.

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

#57

Post by StavrosK »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #41
StavrosK wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recursive-super-ultra-meta-induction: Whenever someone refers to a level of meta-ness, someone else will refer to level n+1.

Transparently false: this thread's length is measurably finite.

For now.

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

#58

Post by rabidsnail »

peterbe wrote: post #26
rabidsnail wrote: post #14

nginx still buys you SSI (which allows you to, for example, cache the same page for all users and have nginx swap out the username with a value stored in memcache), complex rewrite rules, fancy memcache stuff with the memc module (ex: view counters), proxying to more than ten upstream servers, fastcgi, and lots of other fancy stuff. Cloudfront is a replacement for varnish, not nginx.

Isn't that better to do in a programming environment you're more familiar with? LIke python/rails/ASP Then you have much better tools for building unit tests and stuff too.

The performance of doing it in nginx is _much_ better, and you can't do anything complex enough for unit tests to pay off. For the SSI stuff, you have your web framework of choice produce html with SSI tags in it, cache that, and nginx just swaps out the volatile bits at the last second (even for pages in cache).

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

#59

Post by yummyfajitas »

gojomo wrote: post #20
slurgfest wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools like Apache and nginx are not ONLY faster at serving files with less load on the system than a script. They are also more thoroughly audited and battle-tested. And their declarative configs won't go wrong just because the person writing them missed an unbelievably subtle corner case introduced by using a Turing-complete language. It's important because there are so many opportunities for error in serving arbitr…

Here's the thing: Django makes the standard staticfiles app available. It's a great convenience, eliminating extra steps (collecting/moving static assets) and processes (another nginx/etc). And many projects' 'dev'/prototype incarnations are already open to the world, in one way or another. So if this is a security sin, they've already encouraged its widespread commission. A bit of "don't do this" or "don't do this i…

You are correct that the Django folks should be a little more careful with the staticfiles app.

But I disagree with you that the best practice should change from a static server to a front-end proxy cache. Rather, the best practice should consist of using both.

An important concept in security is deperimeterisation- the idea that you shouldn't assume you have a fixed border, inside of which is secure. So by all means, use a front-end proxy cache. But also put some effort into hardening your individual servers, treating them as if they will be operating under a full load.

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

#60

Post by peterwwillis »

alexgartrell wrote: post #46
peterwwillis wrote: post #43

How does this shit make it to the front page? First and foremost, everyone needs caching. It's what makes computers fast. That RAM you have? Cache. The memory in your CPU? Cache. The memory in your hard drive? Cache. Your filesystem has a cache. Your browser has a cache. Your DNS resolver has a cache. Your web server's reverse proxy [should] have a cache. Your database [should] have a cache. Every place that you can…

> How does this shit make it to the front page? Obviously the title was a little ridiculous, but I up-voted it, because it's a novel idea. If you're planning to have almost all of your static assets hosted from the CDN (which is pretty reasonable for almost everyone) then why bother with a super high-throughput low-latency web server if the only purpose is to occasionally refill the CDN? If you end up thrashing the C…

The problem is this isn't a novel idea. Replacing a fast webserver with somebody else's fast webserver is half of the reason most people choose CDN's (the other reason usually being bandwidth). Just using someone else's fast webserver does not obsolete a different fast webserver.

It's totally acceptable that you might not have the infrastructure to serve all of your static content from your measely web servers and 100mbit connection. CDNs are a great choice here. But this has nothing to do with what web server you use, nor does it mean you should process every request dynamically just because right now you have the resources for it using a CDN.

Even with a CDN and an extremely efficient static content layer, you still have to hand out dynamic content to your users individually which a CDN generally will not help with. At a high enough number of requests you will run out of resources (RAM, CPU, Disk, Network, etc). At this point it's handy to have the fastest things you can so scaling doesn't become one huge clusterfuck. Then whoever re-implements Nginx to help handle requests will write a blog post about how Nginx makes CDNs obsolete.

My point before (and now) is: Caching matters, and having a fast frontend web server matters, and CDNs matter, and none of this is directly related: we're talking apples and oranges.

As an aside, CloudFlare seems to use a novel little fast web server:

  psypete@pinhead ~/ :) wget -S -O /dev/null http://4chan.org/ 2>&1 | grep -e "^[[:space:]]\+Server:"
    Server: cloudflare-nginx
    Server: cloudflare-nginx
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