Case Study: MidwayUSA achieves faster deployments and increased automation with NGINX Plus

NGINX Plus Increases Automation and Accelerates Application Deployment at MidwayUSA

MidwayUSA is a longtime e-commerce retailer (100,000+ products, 1.2M+ customers) with a strong focus on performance and uptime. As its Cisco ACE load balancers reached end-of-life and traffic grew, the web operations team needed a more flexible, automatable solution that would be easier to maintain and allow safe testing without impacting production.

The team chose NGINX Plus for its feature set, support, and cost, deploying paired active/passive instances across web, application, and database tiers and integrating with Chef and VMware. The result was simpler, modular configurations and much faster, automated deployments; granular caching that cut response times to ~10–15 ms (versus hundreds of ms for uncached third‑party calls) while using far less CPU than alternatives; and robust logging and A/B testing that improved visibility and enabled low‑risk rollouts.

MidwayUSA

Drew Turner

Web Operations Manager