Essential App Protect NGINX Redirect Example (WIP)

Summary

This paper is a theoretical, also practical, exercise in the consolidation of like applications for different environments. These are generally seen across environmental application stacks for the purpose of testing all stages of the application life cycle.

Broad examples could include the following:

  • Non-Production Environments
    • User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
    • Quality Acceptance Testing (QAT)
    • System Integration Testing (SIT)
  • Development Environments
    • Development (dev)
    • Testing (tst)
  • Production Environments
    • Blue/Green deployment stacks
    • production stacks

This paper will demonstrate, using the development as an example environment pattern from the previous list, using NGINX to consolidate environment fqdn’s for the purpose of grouping like applications and the simplification of EAP application policies for ease of management.

Deployment Example

Selecting the Development environment for the purpose of this exercise, as seen in the diagram presented below, two isolated vpc’s exist; dev & tst.

EAP Consolidated Flow

The suggested approach is the creation of an additional redirection vpc that would accommodate an autoscaling/autohealing group of NGINX instances.

Note

Creation of an additional AWS account for the purpose of the redirection vpc not only simplifies provisioning but allows for fine grain control of environments.