Chapter 10. Load Balancing Traffic to Instances
The Neutron Load Balancing as a Service extension, known as LBaaS, provides users with the ability to load balance traffic to applications running on virtual instances in the cloud. Neutron provides an API to manage virtual IPs, pools, pool members, and health monitors.
In this chapter, we will cover some fundamental load balancing concepts, including:
Virtual IPs, pools, and pool members
Load balancing algorithms
Monitors
Persistence
Neutron uses drivers to interact with hardware or software load balancers. In Kilo, the reference driver interacts with HAProxy. HAProxy is a free, open source load balancer that is available for most Unix-based operating systems. Third-party drivers are supported by LBaaS but are outside the scope of this book.
In this chapter, we will work through the following:
Integrating load balancers into the network
Installing and configuring the LBaaS agent
Creating a load balancer
Demonstrating load balanced traffic to instances...
