Building Nginx Load Balancing with DNS-Based Service Discovery Using Incus
A practical home lab was set up to explore Nginx load balancing combined with DNS-based service discovery in a self-hosted Incus environment. The architecture routes client traffic through an Nginx load balancer to multiple backend web servers, with a dnsmasq DNS server resolving a shared hostname instead of relying on hard-coded IP addresses. Nginx is configured with a resolver directive pointing to the local DNS server, allowing it to dynamically update its backend pool whenever DNS records change. This approach decouples service identity from server identity, meaning adding or replacing a backend node requires only a DNS update rather than an Nginx configuration reload. The lab demonstrated that DNS-based discovery offers greater flexibility and scalability compared to static IP configuration, particularly as the number of backend servers grows.
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