Lua

Purging cached items from NGINX with LUA

Those of you any how familiar with scaling up a service, will by now be familiar with NGINX as a strong workhorse, when it comes to proxy HTTP requests between multiple backend servers. There’s one thing the open source NGINX version doesn’t do however - you can’t issue a PURGE request against a cached resource and delete it from the cache. That is, until we bring in LUA.

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API Backpressure

It's days like this where I love my job. I'm implementing back pressure for API calls that communicate to an external service. Depending on how overloaded the external service is, my API interface adapts to use caching more extensively, or to use a service friendly request retry strategy, minimizing impact on infrastructure and possibly even resolving problems when they occur. This is done by keeping track of a lot of data - timeouts, error responses, request duration, ratios between failed and successful requests,.
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