Case Study: Locaweb achieves high-throughput SSL/TLS load balancing and zero‑downtime deployments with NGINX Plus (NGINX)

Locaweb Pioneers Brazilian Web Services with NGINX Plus

Locaweb, Brazil’s leading hosting and internet-services provider with roughly 265,000 customers and millions of mailboxes, needed to make SSL/TLS mandatory for mail traffic but found its hardware load balancers couldn’t handle the encrypted throughput and were expensive to scale. The company required a high-performance, scalable load‑balancing solution that could support large numbers of simultaneous SSL connections without disrupting customers.

Locaweb deployed NGINX Plus in multiple 3‑node clusters to handle TCP/HTTP load balancing, caching, active health checks, live JSON monitoring, and on‑the‑fly reconfiguration integrated with its CFEngine DevOps workflow. The migration delivered dramatically higher SSL throughput (supporting ~40,000 simultaneous webmail connections in one segment), improved visibility and automated incident response, zero‑downtime configuration changes, and significant cost savings versus hardware appliances.

Locaweb

Danilo Acquaviva

Systems Administrator