Use multiple dockerized Nginx behind a host Nginx

I have multiple and different dockerized applications, each one comes with its proper Nginx service which sends traffic to its containers based on some rules.

I need to put those applications on the same server, so I added a new Nginx in the host that will handle SSL, and forward the traffic to the correct dockerized Nginx.

Question: Is it ok to use Nginx in the host which will forward traffic to multiple different dockerized Nginx? Does it have any known problems? will that affect performance?

1. Is it ok to use Nginx in the host which will forward traffic to multiple different dockerized Nginx?

   Yes. This is one way to do it.

2. Does it have any known problems?

   The host instance of NGINX is not containerised which may make it more difficult to configure. Another common way to do this is to have a docker container bound to port 80 and 443 which handles all ingress traffic and diverts it to the corresponding container.

   Finally, other container orchestration systems like Kubernetes have the concept of Ingress built in and allow it to be configured just like you'd configure a container in Docker compose. The upside to Kubernetes Ingress is that it can scale up/down to multiple servers whereas you are more limited with Docker compose.

3. Will that affect performance?

   Having an extra hop to get to the destination container does negatively harm performance but its a common thing to do.