automatix

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asked May 4, 2011 at 2:47

gdbgdb

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It's used for proxying requests to other servers.

An example from http://wiki.nginx.org/LoadBalanceExample is:

http {
  upstream myproject {
    server 127.0.0.1:8000 weight=3;
    server 127.0.0.1:8001;
    server 127.0.0.1:8002;    
    server 127.0.0.1:8003;
  }

  server {
    listen 80;
    server_name www.domain.com;
    location / {
      proxy_pass http://myproject;
    }
  }
}

This means all requests for / go to the any of the servers listed under upstream XXX, with a preference for port 8000.

If we have a single server we can directly include it in the proxy_pass directive. For example:

  server {
    ...
    location / {
      proxy_pass http://192.168.206.105:80;
      ...
    }
  }

But in case if we have many servers we use upstream to maintain the servers. Nginx will load-balance based on the incoming traffic, as shown in this answer.