I am currently creating a monolithic application on Rail (7.0.3), have created a chat application using Action Cable and WebSocket communication.
I am using LightSail, which is easy to build, but does the Lightsail load balancer support WebSocket communication? or Do I need to make changes to the ALB on LightSail?
Related
I am working backend server launched on ECS cluster, hosted on an EC2 instance using docker.
the ECS is running great, exposed by IP address and port, but to be used with my ios app it needs to be served over https.
How do serve my ECS container over https? I have read a couple of things regarding using a load balancer, but tutorials are outdated and I can't find one that shows configuration after the ecs cluster has already been created.
Please point me to the right direction so I can get it served over https.
You need to have the following resources:
DNS address
Valid SSL Certificate
Load Balancer
Load balancer security group
Target Group
The target group will mediate between your server and your load balancer.
Also, in the security group define all the rules you currently have in the server security group, and in the server's security group ad a rule that open is open to all traffic in all ports with the security group instead of id.
This guide can help you:https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/classic/elb-create-https-ssl-load-balancer.html
(look at Create an HTTPS/SSL load balancer using the console)
A web application that generates dynamic content requires two components:
Web Servers - primarily communicate with clients, by handling HTTP requests and responses while serving content.
Application Servers - on the other hand, generally sit behind a web server. If the web server can not generate the requested content via static files, it then reaches the application server to generate the dynamic content.
Software Examples
Examples of web servers include Nginx and Apache
Examples of app servers include Puma and Unicorn
Web servers and application servers work together as components in typical web applications.
Running Rails in Production
When running a Rails app in production using passenger, some options include:
Running Passenger as a stand alone solution
Running Passenger as an app server and Apache/Nginx as the web server
Running Rails in Development
When running a Rails app in development, it is configured to use Puma by default - see Ruby Docs. Puma is an application server. How is it that by default, in Rails, Puma can run the entire web application on its own? There's no mention of a web server like Nginx or Apache in the application stack.
I don't understand how this is possible. Can someone please explain this? Puma has always been an application server, not a web server...
Thanks in advance.
The distinction between a "web server" and an "application server" is rather muddy and has a lot of implicit (and mostly historical) baggage.
Generally, a web server is understood as a software which communicates via HTTP (or HTTPS) to clients and send static files as a response to requests.
An application server on the other hand often does not communicate directly with clients (but instead with intermediate server systems in front of it, such as loadbalancers, proxy servers or well, web servers) and its main function is to respond to requests with dynamically generated content. Application servers sometimes communicate with those intermediate servers using protocols other than HTTP, such as FCGI or AJP.
Often, we will see classic webservers (such as nginx, Apache, lighttpd) used together with an application server such as Puma, Unicorn, Thin, or Passenger. The reason for that is that those webservers are more efficient in serving static files than the application servers which are more geared towards helping the application generate dynamic responses. Also, web servers might be better suited than application servers for buffering requests and responses from clients without using a lot of resources.
With that being said, in the last couple of decades, it became increasingly common to just use HTTP everywhere rather than to use e.g. FCGI internally. Thus, application servers are generally able to speak to HTTP clients on their own without strictly requiring an additional web server. Often, these application servers can also serve static files directly and thus take on most features of a webserver too.
However, as written above, most webservers are magnitudes faster and more scalable when serving static files. Also, some application servers such as Unicorn are not intended to be exposed to clients directly since Unicorn does not buffer requests and responses efficiently. Instead, they rely on a frontend server such as nginx for that.
Thus, as a conclusion: most Ruby application servers can be used without a webserver directly. With e.g. Puma this will work quite okay. To more efficiently serve static assets, or to loadbalance or protect your application, you can also introduce a webserver / proxy in front of your application server such as nginx or Apache.
I have a web app (Node.js on Elastic Beanstalk) already serving at example.com. I have a WordPress blog that I want to serve at example.com/blog.
I want to setup AWS Load Balancer to route requests at /blog to my WordPress server and all other requests at / to my web-app. How do I do it using AWS Load Balancer(s)?
My DNS and both of these servers are on AWS. I don't want to setup a self-managed Nginx/HAProxy reverse proxy. If possible, I want to avoid using CloudFront configuration at the moment.
This is possible by adding a listener rule to an Application Load Balancer. Listener rules determine how the load balancer routes requests to the targets in one or more target groups.
After creating the load balancer, see Listeners >> Add Listener. Add a Rule with a Condition for Path is /blog then select Action forward to send traffic to a separate target group mapped to the Wordpress instances.
For more see the docs for Listener Rules for Your Application Load Balancer.
I'm deploying a Rails app to production. It seems that Puma is fast and handles many of the things I want in a web server.
I'm wondering if I even need to bother with Nginx, and what I'd be missing out on if just used Puma?
Nginx is a web server and puma is an application server.
Both have their advantages, and you need both.
Some examples:
Static redirects- you could setup your nginx to redirect all http traffic to the same url with https. This way such trivial requests will never hit your app server.
Multipart upload- Nginx is better suited to handle multipart uploads. Nginx will combine all the requests and send it as a single file to puma.
Serving static assets- It is recommended to serve static assets (those in /public/ endpoint in rails) via a webserver without loading your app server.
There are some basic DDoS protections built-in in nginx.
There's a significant difference between a web server and an application server.
Nginx (Web Server) and Puma (App Server) will handle requests in your application simultaneously.
Whenever there's a request coming from a client, it will be received by the nginx and then it will be forwarded to the application server which is Puma over here.
Having nginx as a web server will help you in handling multiple requests much more efficiently. Being a multi threaded server it will distribute requests into multiple threads making your application more faster.
As mentioned by vendant you can serve static pages using a web server as it will be a better approach.
If you're going to include a certification to your web application then you can provide redirects from http to https over here which will hit the app server only after redirecting to https.
If you're going to use Puma then you've to make sure that server is using resources efficiently but if you'll use nginx then it's going to take care of it by itself.
you can get more info here.
I have a Ruby on Rails App hosted on AWS using Elastic-beanstalk which works with HTTP 1 now I want to use HTTP 2. Can someone suggest me the best approach
If I remember correctly when you add a new load balancer to your Elastic Beanstalk environment, it defaults to using a Classic Load Balancer, which doesn't support HTTP/2, I think the solution would be using an Application Load Balancer that does support it, you can find this info here. You can also specify it while creating your environment as you can see here. This will only allow HTTP/2 communication between the client and the ALB, your ALB will convert those HTTP/2 requests into HTTP/1.1 to communicate with your instance.
As seen here: "If end-to-end HTTP/2 is a requirement for your application you can use a Layer 4 ELB ( Classic Load Balancer with TCP listener or Network Load Balancer). If you are interested also in SSL offloading the only option for now is Classic Load Balancer with an SSL listener."