Pushing Nginx to its limit with Lua

Matthieu Tourne from CloudFlare shares how they use Nginx, a popular reverse proxy service, with Lua, a scripting language that is easy to integrate and has minimalistic design. They have been adding more simple services written in Lua to their infrastructure. The benefits of using Nginx+Lua include its asynchronous nature, blazingly fast speed due to the LuaJIT interpreter, and no need for callbacks. An example of a log aggregator for Nginx is provided, which can be added to any existing configuration. Using Lua instead of custom C modules allows for adding interesting new capabilities to Nginx while being easy to write and maintain.