Rate Limiting & Throttling with Nginx

Imagine a popular website or API. What happens if one user or a malicious bot sends thousands of requests per second?

This is where rate limiting comes in! It's a crucial technique to control the number of requests a client can make to your server within a specific timeframe.

• Prevents abuse and DDoS attacks.
• Ensures fair resource usage for all clients.
• Protects your backend services from overload.

Nginx provides powerful directives to implement rate limiting. We'll focus on two main ones:

• limit_req_zone: Defines the parameters for a rate limiting zone. Think of it as setting up the rules for a specific type of traffic.
• limit_req: Applies the defined rate limiting rules to requests within a specific location or server block. This is where the magic happens!