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First off, nginx is awesome and you can do all the things we did with vulcand with nginx, so it was just a question of friction.

The reason we went with vulcand is that it natively supports what we wanted to do i.e. route to micro-services based on dynamic etcd driven configuration. To do the same thing in nginx (at the time), we would have either had to use confd or custom lua.

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We actually looked at VulcanD in an older version of Empire. When we decided to use a routing layer with this version of Empire, rather than just letting Empire/ELB expose each service (mostly because it is a lot easier for us to later shut off public access to each service) we threw together nginx because it was so simple.

I think at this point everytime we move a service we add like 5 lines to an nginx config, re-deploy the router in Empire, and the service is exposed.

The internal 'service discovery' makes this a lot easier, since we just have to tell nginx to route to http://<app_name> - no domain, no port, nothing more than the app_name thanks to DNS/resolv.conf search path & ELB stuff.

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