[nathan_f77]

I've stopped using Nginx in my Docker containers, and I just run puma directly. It's still behind a load balancer that also handles TLS termination. I also serve all the assets from the Rails server, but they're cached with a CDN, so it only needs to serve each file once.

If you're using Docker with Kubernetes, Convox, Docker Swarm, Rancher, etc., then I don't think you need to run Nginx or Apache. I ran some load tests on my staging environment with and without Nginx, and it didn't make any difference.

This was a really good article that helped me understand request routing a bit better: https://www.speedshop.co/2015/07/29/scaling-ruby-apps-to-100...

[jrochkind1]

If you weren't caching with CDN, would serving those static assets as efficiently as possible be a good reason to keep using (eg) nginx, do you think?

Oh, I guess load balancing (with a multiple-host scale) is another good reason, if you don't have heroku doing it for you, nginx is a convenient way to do it just fine.

[nathan_f77]

I don't know if there's any middle ground where you'd want to use Nginx instead of a CDN. If it's an internal app then it doesn't really matter. But if you have any reason to worry about the performance of serving static assets, then you should always be using a CDN like CloudFront or CloudFlare, etc.

But yeah, Nginx can be a great solution for load balancing and TLS termination.