NGINX Out, ALB In - 70% Cheaper Redirects with Zero Servers

Before jumping into the why and how, here’s what we achieved: ✅ Replaced a single point of failure with AWS-native components 💸 Reduced monthly costs by 70% 🧑‍💻 No more SSH, servers, or NGINX restarts 🔐 Fully managed SSL with ACM 🛠️ Everything codified and versioned via Terraform All of this — without a single EC2 server or NGINX config file. Why we left EC2 + NGINX behind (and how much it saved us) We had a simple goal: redirect traffic for over 70 different domains. At first, we solved it with what we knew — an EC2 instance running NGINX with hardcoded 301 and 302 rules. It worked… until it didn’t.