Multi-host deployment of ASP.NET Core applications

Question

I am quite confused as I haven't seen any blogs or instructions on how to host ASP.NET Core/.NET Core applications with HA and multi-host deployments. All examples are either:

1) One NGINX reverse-proxy, one Kestrel
2) One IIS reverse-proxy, one Kestrel

And both components on same host. In real-life production environments, you have LB maybe service discovery, multiple frontends, multiple backends, etc. But for this case there are no instructions whatsoever. So my questions would be for multi-host environments:

• Do I deploy one IIS/NGINX as LB/Reverse-proxy, and redirect requests to Kestrels running on many separate VM:s, i.e. various different IP:s?
• Or do I run an NGINX/F5 for load-balancing on one host, then route http traffic to various VM:s that run IIS+Kestrel, or just Kestrel? Is IIS required in this setup as NGINX acts as LB?
• If I run IIS or NGINX as reverse-proxy, can they keep alive Kestrels on different VM:s, or does each Kestrel require exactly one IIS/NGINX to keep it alive? I.e. the Kestrel process must be on the same same host as the reverse-proxy?

All answers are very welcome, and thanks a lot in advance! :)

Answer 1

I'm running NGINX at the edge as a load balancer and for SSL Termination and multiple servers with IIS + Kestrel serving MVC. This is working well for us. You may not need it but I've found NGINX to be quite a bit more sophisticated and powerful than anything you could do with IIS. Obviously F5 or something would work as well. Previously I also ran for a while using AWS ELB load balancers which also worked fine, just didn't have much configurability. So depends on your needs.

As was mentioned already, IIS is needed on each box running kestrel to manage the process. You could do this some other way, but using IIS is the easiest.