NGINX Load Balancing for Wildcard DNS does not work

Question

I am trying to use NGINX as a load balancer for an Elastic Cloud Enterprise platform which consists of 3 VMs. The intention is to load balance a query e.g. http://xxxxxxx.ece.dev.org:9200 where xxxxxx refers to the Elasticsearch cluster and is variable depending on the elasticsearch cluster.

I have a wildcard DNS record which directs *.ece.dev.org to the NGINX IP e.g. *.ece.dev.org -> 10.1.2.99

Then in the conf file, the server is defined as:

upstream ece-proxy{ 
server 10.1.2.3:9200; #these are the servers which host the platform 
server 10.1.2.4:9200; 
server 10.1.2.5:9200; 
} 

server{ 
listen 80; 
server_name *.ece.dev.org; 
location / { 
proxy_pass http://ece-proxy; 
proxy_http_version 1.1; 
proxy_set_header Host $host; 
} 
} 

When I used the nginx configuration above, the URL http://xxxxxxxxxx.ece.dev.org:9200 was not able to connect.

If the wildcard DNS record directly resolves to one of the cloud VMs (e.g. *.ece.dev.org -> 10.1.2.3), then the URL is able to connect successfully.

(Directly entering 10.1.2.3:9200 or 10.1.2.4:9200 etc does not return anything. A cluster ID must be provided)

How should NGINX be configured to handle wildcard sub domains for load balancing?

Answer 1

We use the following for server_name:

server_name ~^(.*)\.ece\.dev\.org$ ;

Answer 2

I myself haven't used NGINIX, but I could see you have made the NGNIX server to listen on port 80. But, you are sending the request to port 9200.