Load balancing in Binero cloudΒΆ

Load balancers consists of the following constructs:

  • The Listener is the load balanced service as its presented to users. It listens for connections on a port, for example port 80/tcp (additional listeners can be added to a load balancer after creation and thus allow for more than a single port). The listener gets its own IP on a subnet onto which is normally attached a floating IP so as to enable it to be reached from the internet.

  • The Pool is the active collection of member instances. It also sets the common configuration for the pool members that are included in the pool.

  • The Pool members are also called backend- or real servers. These are compute instances that run a particular service (for example HTTPS to serve a web application) to which the load balancer redirects its requests. Members are defined statically in the load balancer but it will then add and remove them based on their current status.

  • Health monitors decide dynamically if a member should be included in the pool or not by continuously assessing their functionality and removing or adding them automatically based on the result.

The various constructs are discussed in detail in their own sections.

Load balancers are highly available, this means that they are made up from two individually running processes which work in parallel, one active and one passive. Mostly this is important during maintenance but it could also help with issues where one load balancer for one reason or another, goes offline.

You are only able to setup configuration for one protocol (meaning service type or TCP/UDP-port) at a time, so if you for example want both HTTP and HTTPS setup, you would start with one (probably HTTPS, maybe using our SSL/TLS termination using Load Balancer guide) and then setup the other (probably HTTP with HTTPS redirection) as a separate listener with (if applicable) a separate pool (that could well distribute load to the same pool members), a load balancer will support multiple protocols but they are configured one at a time.