Introducing the NGINX Microservices Reference Architecture – Overview of Proxy, Router Mesh, and Fabric Models

NGINX has been involved in the microservices movement from the start, offering a lightweight, high‑performance, and flexible platform that fits well with microservice architectures. To help customers adopt microservices, the NGINX Professional Services team created the NGINX Microservices Reference Architecture (MRA), a set of reusable models and a downloadable demo application called Ingenious.

The MRA consists of three detailed models—Proxy Model, Router Mesh Model, and Fabric Model—each accompanied by configuration code for NGINX Plus. The reference architecture aims to provide a ready‑to‑use blueprint for building microservice‑based systems, create a testing platform for new NGINX features, and give NGINX a deeper understanding of partner ecosystems.

Proxy Model is a simple network model suitable for initial microservice applications or for converting moderately complex monoliths. NGINX or NGINX Plus acts as an ingress controller, routing requests to services and using dynamic DNS for service discovery. It works well as an API‑gateway template but is not the most efficient for heavy load‑balancing scenarios.

Router Mesh Model adds a load balancer on each host, actively managing connections between microservices. It provides more robust load balancing, supports active health checks with NGINX Plus, and integrates with service registries such as etcd for dynamic configuration.

Fabric Model places NGINX Plus inside every container, handling all inbound and outbound HTTP traffic. It supports full SSL/TLS termination, keep‑alive connections, service discovery via ZooKeeper, and built‑in circuit‑breaker patterns, making it ideal for high‑performance, secure, and highly scalable applications.

The reference architecture is demonstrated with the Ingenious photo‑sharing application, a simplified Flickr‑like service that implements all three models. Ingenious was chosen because it is easy for users and developers to understand, involves multiple data dimensions, showcases a clean UI, and stresses both high‑intensity and low‑intensity workloads.

In conclusion, the NGINX Microservices Reference Architecture provides an exciting, extensible foundation for customers and partners to build, test, and evolve microservice‑based systems, leveraging both open‑source NGINX and NGINX Plus features.