Balancing your network traffic across servers, clients, and proxies is key to keeping your customers happy and optimizing your infrastructure. With NGINX Plus high‑performance load balancing, you can scale out and provide redundancy, dynamically reconfigure your infrastructure without the need for a restart, and enable global server load balancing (GSLB), session persistence, and active health checks. NGINX Plus load balances not only HTTP traffic, but also TCP, UDP, and gRPC.

HTTP Load Balancing - When load balancing HTTP traffic, NGINX Plus terminates each HTTP connection and processes each request individually.

TCP and UDP Load Balancing - NGINX Plus can also load balance TCP applications such as MySQL, and UDP applications such as DNS and RADIUS. For TCP applications, NGINX Plus terminates the TCP connections and creates new connections to the backend.

Load‑Balancing Methods - NGINX Plus supports a number of application load‑balancing methods for HTTP, TCP, and UDP load balancing. All methods take into account the weight you can optionally assign to each upstream server.

Connection Limiting with NGINX Plus - You can limit the number of connections NGINX Plus establishes with upstream HTTP or TCP servers, or the number of sessions with UDP servers.

Session Persistence - You can configure NGINX Plus to identify user sessions and send all requests within a session to the same upstream server. This is vital when app servers store state locally, because fatal errors occur when a request for an in‑progress user session is sent to a different server.

Active Health Checks
By default NGINX performs basic checks on responses from upstream servers, retrying failed requests where possible. NGINX Plus adds out-of-band application health checks (also known as synthetic transactions) and a slow‑start feature to gracefully add new and recovered servers into the load‑balanced group.