Deploying Nginx on Kubernetes#

Nginx shows up in Kubernetes in two completely different roles. First, as a regular Deployment serving static content or acting as a reverse proxy for your application. Second, as an Ingress controller that watches Ingress resources and dynamically reconfigures itself. These are different deployments with different images and different configuration models. Knowing when to use which saves you from over-engineering or under-engineering your setup.

Nginx as a Web Server (Deployment + Service + ConfigMap)#

For serving static files or acting as a reverse proxy in front of your application pods, deploy nginx as a standard Deployment.

Configuration File Structure#

Nginx configuration follows a hierarchical block structure. The main configuration file is typically /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, which includes files from /etc/nginx/conf.d/ or /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/.

# /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
user nginx;
worker_processes auto;           # Match CPU core count
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid /run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections 1024;     # Per worker process
    multi_accept on;             # Accept multiple connections at once
}

http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] '
                    '"$request" $status $body_bytes_sent '
                    '"$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" '
                    '$request_time $upstream_response_time';

    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main;

    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;
    keepalive_timeout 65;
    types_hash_max_size 2048;
    client_max_body_size 16m;

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
}

The worker_processes auto directive sets one worker per CPU core. Each worker handles worker_connections simultaneous connections, so total capacity is worker_processes * worker_connections. For most production deployments, auto with 1024 connections per worker is sufficient.