Implementing Load Balancing with Nginx and Spring Boot

The article begins with a brief overview of load balancing, distinguishing hardware load balancers from software solutions like Nginx and describing the basic principle of distributing incoming requests across multiple backend servers.

It then enumerates the six load‑balancing methods supported by open‑source Nginx (Round Robin, Least Connections, IP Hash, Generic Hash, Random, and the two Plus‑only Least‑Time variants) and explains when each method is appropriate.

For each method, the author provides a concrete upstream block example, such as:

upstream xuwujing { server www.panchengming.com; server www.panchengming2.com; }

for Round Robin, and similar snippets for Least Connections, IP Hash, Generic Hash, and Random strategies.

The guide then shows how to combine Nginx with a Spring Boot service: preparing the JDK and Nginx environment, creating two Spring Boot JARs on different ports, defining an

upstream pancm { server 127.0.0.1:8085; server 127.0.0.1:8086; }

block, and configuring a server block that proxies traffic to the upstream with appropriate timeout and header settings.

Testing steps include starting Nginx (using the appropriate command for Linux or Windows), launching the Spring Boot JARs, and refreshing a browser to observe that requests are evenly distributed between the two backend services, as confirmed by console logs and screenshots.

Finally, the article notes practical considerations such as ensuring the proxy_set_header Host $host:port directive when the service does not run on port 80, and mentions that the same configuration works on both Windows and Linux platforms.