How to do it...

We'll start off with a basic round-robin configuration, with our upstream servers coming locally. We'll define the upstream block directive at the http block level, outside of the server block:

upstream localapp { 
    server 127.0.0.1:8080; 
    server 127.0.0.1:8081; 
    server 127.0.0.1:8082; 
}  

Then, we'll define our server block directive:

server { 
    listen       80; 
    server_name  load.nginxcookbook.com; 
    access_log  /var/log/nginx/load-access.log  combined; 
    location / { 
        proxy_pass http://localapp; 
    } 
}