NGINX on Oracle Cloud Workload Brief 

AmpereOne® processors are designed from the ground up to deliver exceptional performance for Cloud Native applications. With an innovative architecture that delivers high performance, linear scalability, and stellar energy efficiency, AmpereOne® enables applications like NGINX to run in a predictable manner, with minimal variance under increasing loads.

Oracle Cloud offers the cost-optimized A2 VMs powered by AmpereOne® processors in multiple flexible VM shapes – 946GB total memory, up to 78 Gbps networking bandwidth, and a wide range of network-attached storage options. These VMs are suitable for scale-out Cloud Native workloads like web servers, in-memory caches, databases, containerized microservices, data-logging, media transcoding, and Big Data applications.

NGINX is an open-source, high-performance, HTTP server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy, and HTTP cache. It uses a sophisticated event-driven architecture that allows it to scale to hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections on modern hardware. NGINX is the most popular web server among high-traffic websites, with a 34% market share, according to W3Techs. 

The AmpereOne® based Oracle Cloud A2 VMs outperform the E5 VMs by 18% as can been seen in Figure 1.

Figure 2 shows the price-performance difference when running NGINX on the Oracle Cloud A2 and E5 instances – the A2 VM has a 1.8X better price-performance ratio compared to the E5 instances. The instance pricing is derived from the Oracle Cloud cost estimator tool: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/costestimator.html

In these tests, the NGINX server was used to serve a static file compressed with gzip over HTTPS. The A2 and E5 systems under test (SUT) were 4 OCPU VMs. WRK was used as a load generator running on a separate 16 OCPU VM with both VMs being part of the same virtual subnet. The performance metric being measured was the throughput (requests/seconds) with a p99 latency Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 1 ms.

The Oracle Cloud A2 VMs powered by AmpereOne® processors are an excellent choice for Cloud Native workloads such as NGINX due to their innovative Cloud Native design, and compelling price-performance. For cloud application developers, transitioning NGINX applications from legacy x86 VMs to AmpereOne® VMs is seamless due to the maturity of the aarch64 software ecosystem. For more information about the Oracle A2 Virtual Machines with AmpereOne processors, visit the Oracle Cloud blog.