Nginx for URL hash based routing

I wanted Nginx to do sticky-URL routing. One good way of doing sticky-URL routing is to take hash of the URL and route it between the available nodes.

There are several ways to do sticky-URL routing. Here is the LB configuration that I have tested with. It uses Lua. Lua is a very capable language.

1:  upstream wso2servers {  
2:    hash $urlpart consistent;  
3:    server 192.168.1.2:9763;  
4:    server 192.168.1.2:9764;  
5:  }  
6:    
7:    server {  
8:      listen 8080;  
9:      server_name router.wso2;  
10:      location / {  
11:         set_by_lua $urlpart "return string.match(ngx.arg[1],\"/t/.-/\")" $request_uri;  
12:         proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;  
13:         proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;  
14:         proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;  
15:         proxy_set_header Host $http_host;  
16:         proxy_read_timeout 5m;  
17:         proxy_send_timeout 5m;  
18:         proxy_pass http://wso2servers;  
19:      }  
20:    }  

Now the more interesting question why someone needs to do sticky-urls? There can be many reasons, but mine was to achieve the most basic way of doing tenant partitioning. Tenant partitioning is explained here. As long as a string is representing the tenant is in the URL we can do tenant aware load balancing to achieve tenant partitioning.