Of course you can connect your Play application directly to the internet but I prefer to use a frontend proxy in our production environments. Nginx is useful for several reasons. Caching and high performance delivery of static assets (or other GET requests) SSL termination gzip compression Load balancing several Play applications easy maintainance as you can shut down one Play application node for updates In this article I will show you a typical setup and describe the steps and configuration options that I chose for our production setup.