Use case
Secure Regional API Access with NGINX Reverse Proxy
- Dhruv Bardolia
About the Customer
Glomaxia is a global facilitator for direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands aiming to expand across international markets, particularly in the e-commerce, retail, and direct sales industries. With a workforce of 200+ employees and clients spanning across Azerbaijan, Central Asia, and the Baltics, Glomaxia provides end-to-end solutions including platform development, logistics, staffing, and fulfillment. Their focus on digital innovation and operational efficiency enables global brands to scale quickly and compliantly across new markets.
Customer Challenge
To comply with Azerbaijan’s tax regulations, certain web features—specifically those requiring communication with the Azerbaijan tax authority API—must originate from within Azerbaijan. However, the customer’s primary infrastructure is hosted in AWS Frankfurt, and requests from outside the country were blocked or triggered compliance errors.
This posed several risks:
- Disrupted tax-related features for Azerbaijan users
- Regulatory non-compliance, risking fines or service restrictions
- User mistrust due to failed pop-ups and broken features
These problems needed to be solved without compromising system performance or deploying an entire replica environment locally, which would have increased cost and operational complexity.
Solution
IAMOPS designed and implemented a region-specific reverse proxy infrastructure hosted on a Linux-based VPS in Azerbaijan. Using http://Hostimul.com for regional compliance, a lightweight NGINX proxy was set up to forward specific requests from the customer’s main AWS application to the Azerbaijan government tax API.
The solution followed AWS Well-Architected Framework principles and included:
- NGINX for reverse proxy operations
- UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall) for IP-level access control
- New Relic for infrastructure monitoring (CPU, memory, etc.)
- UptimeRobot for heartbeat-based uptime alerts
- SSL termination to ensure secure HTTPS traffic
IAMOPS deployed this infrastructure within a two-day timeline. IP whitelisting was enforced strictly for AWS-originated traffic, and DNS routing was set up via Route53 (tax-az.myglomaxia.com) to direct the targeted requests.
Pre and Post-Implementation Support
- IAMOPS handled VPS procurement, security hardening, and DNS updates.
- Post-deployment, IAMOPS configured proactive alerting and monitoring to ensure 99.9% uptime.
- IAMOPS also provided step-by-step documentation for in-house maintenance and scalability options.
Results & Benefits
The new infrastructure achieved its core objective: tax API pop-up features now work reliably and in full compliance with Azerbaijani laws.
Key measurable benefits:
- <300ms proxy latency for local users
- 9% uptime monitored via UptimeRobot
- 80% lower cost than deploying an entire regional cloud infrastructure
- Complete SSL and access control enforcement with no security incidents reported
By using a targeted, lightweight architecture, the customer was able to satisfy both compliance and performance needs without sacrificing scalability or observability.
About IAMOPS
IAMOPS is a full DevOps suite company that supports technology companies to achieve intense production readiness.
Our mission is to ensure that our clients’ infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines are scalable, mitigate failure points, optimize performance, ensure uptime, and minimize costs.
Our DevOps suite includes DevOps Core, NOC 24/7, FinOps, QA Automation, and DevSecOps to accelerate overall exponential growth.
As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner and Reseller, we focus on two key pillars: Professionalism by adhering to best practices and utilizing advanced technologies, Customer Experience with responsiveness, availability, clear project management, and transparency to provide an exceptional experience for our clients.
