Managing load balancer

An important reason to use a cloud is to achieve scalability at a relatively low cost. Load balancers play a key role in scalability. We can attach multiple instances behind a load balancer to distribute the traffic between the instances. Google Cloud load balancer also supports health checks which helps to ensure that traffic is sent to healthy instances only.

How to do it…

Let us create a load balancer and attach an instance to it:

- name: create load balancer and attach to instance
  gce_lb:
    name: loadbalancer1
    region: us-west1
    members: ["{{ zone }}/app"]
    httphealthcheck_name: hc
    httphealthcheck_port: 80
    httphealthcheck_path: "/"
    service_account_email: "{{ service_account_email }}"
    project_id: "{{ project_id }}"
    credentials_file: "{{ credentials_file }}"
  tags:
  - recipe7

For creating a load balancer, we need to supply a comma separated list of instances. We also need to provide health check parameters including a name, a port and...