Introduction

Load balancing in simplest terms refers to dynamically distributing application incoming network traffic across a group of backend nodes. It helps to maintain high availability, scalability, fault-tolerance of your application and gives a smooth experience to the application users because applications are serving hundreds of thousands, or millions, of concurrent requests from users or clients and return the correct response as per request. To cost‑effectively scale to meet these high volumes, modern computing best practice generally requires adding more servers.

A load balancer acts as a single point of contact for the application. It helps to manage your application servers and to route users/client requests across all servers capable of fulfilling those requests in a manner that maximises speed and capacity utilization and ensures that no one server is overworked, which could degrade performance. If a single server goes down, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining online servers. When a new server is added to the server group, the load balancer automatically starts to send requests to it.

Load distribution decision is based on the configured process and the traffic that is coming to the application. In this process, it checks connection requests type received from clients, using the protocol and port that you configure for front-end (client to load balancer) connections. It forwards requests to one or more registered backend nodes using the protocol and port number that you set for back-end (load balancer to backend nodes) connections.

The following are the essential characteristics of Load balancer:

  • You have the flexibility to add and remove backend nodes from your load balancer to handle the traffic load based on your requirement changes, and that is possible without interrupting the flow of user’s requests to your application. Registering Nodes add it to your load balancer. The load balancer starts routing requests to nodes as soon as it is registered. Deregistering Nodes removes it from your load balancer. The load balancer stops routing requests to nodes as more quickly as deregistered. A node that deregistered remains running, but no longer receives traffic from the load balancer, and you can register it with the load balancer again when you need it.

  • When you create a load balancer, you must choose whether to make it an internal load balancer or an external load balancer (Internet-facing ). The external load balancers have public IP addresses. Therefore, it can route requests from clients over the Internet to the Backend Nodes. The internal load balancers have only private IP addresses. Consequently, it can not route requests from clients over the private subnets only to the backend node.

  • E2E Load balancers support different types of load balancing algorithms that meant for various benefits, and the choice depends on your needs.

  • Monitoring of load balancer health in real-time is a free service that provides insights into resource usage across your infrastructure. There are several different display metrics to help you track the operational health of your infrastructure. The information graphically represented on the MyAccount portal. Learn more

  • Alerts You have the flexibility to easily configure alert policies, set email notifications to enable you to respond quickly to critical situations when load balancer health alerts are triggered. Learn more

  • You can attach a Reserved IP address either as an add-on IP which is going to associate with the load balancer’s primary network interface and work as an additional IP address. Or attach as a primary public IP which will work as the load balancer’s primary network interface with a load balancer. Learn More

How to Launch a Load Balancer Appliance?

Initiate Load Balancer Creation

  • Login to MyAccount portal using your credentials set up at the time of creating and activating the E2E Networks My Account.

  • After you log in to the E2E Networks My Account, you can click on any of the following options.

  • On the left side of the MyAccount dashboard, click on the Load Balancers sub-menu available under the Products section.

../_images/Dashboard_Loadbalancer_page2.png
  • You will be routed to the Manage Load Balancers page. Now, you have to click on the ‘Add New LB’ button to create a load balancer that takes you to the create Load balancer page.

../_images/manage_lb_blank_page2.png

Select your Load Balancer Plan

  • All the load balancer plans are listed based on different memory, vCPU and storage configuration and price.

  • Please select a plan you wish to use to create the new load balancer.

../_images/lb_plan_list2.png
  • After selecting the plan, you need to click on the create button. It will take you to the final stage of the ‘Create Load Balancer’ page.

  • You will have to enter various configuration details and preferences (like name, mode, port, list type, SSL certificates, etc.) for front-end (client to load balancer) connections, and back-end (load balancer to nodes) connections.

../_images/create_lb_config_page2.png

Frontend Configuration

  • Choose a Load Balancer Name - Default name is provided based on the Plan you selected, but you can modify and give a string of characters that you can enter as the name of your Load Balancer Appliance.

Load Balancer Type

  • Choose a Type of Load Balancer - Please select the type either “Internal” or “External” based on your use case.

    • Internal Load Balancer: The Internal Load balancer has only private IP address and can only route requests from clients over the private subnets only to the backend node that is registered with the Load Balancer.

    • External Load Balancer: An Internet-facing Load Balancer with a static Public IP, so it can route requests from clients over the Internet to the Backend Nodes that are registered with the Load Balancer.

Suppose your application has multiple tiers, for example, web servers that must be connected to the Internet and database servers that only connected to the web servers. In that case, you can design an architecture that uses both internal and Internet-facing load balancers. Create an Internet-facing load balancer and register the web servers with it. Create an internal load balancer and register the database servers with it. The web servers receive requests from the Internet-facing load balancer and send requests for the database servers to the internal load balancer. The database servers receive requests from the internal load balancer.

Load Balancing Policy

  • Choose Balancing Policy - Different load balancing policy algorithms provide different benefits; the choice of load balancing method depends on your needs. Please select the balancing method either “Source IP Hash” or “Round Robin” based on your use case.

    • Round Robin Method: This method selects the backend servers in turns distributing the connection requests evenly among them.

    • Source IP Hash: This method selects which backend server to use based on a hash of the source IP, i.e. a user’s IP address, ensuring that a user will connect to the same backend server.

Load Balancer Protocol

  • Choose Mode - Mode is a process that checks for connection requests using a specified protocol and a port for front-end (client to load balancer) connections. E2E Networks Load Balancer supports the following protocols.

    • Support both HTTP and HTTPS protocol independently

    • HTTPS (secure HTTP) using SSL/TCL: Supports the X-Forwarded headers and Requires an SSL certificate deployed on the load balanc****er

    • HTTP: Supports the X-Forwarded headers.

Note

For the back-end (load balancer to nodes) connections of a load balancer HTTP protocol by default is used.

  • Specify SSL certificate - If you use either “HTTPS (SSL or TLS)” or “Both (HTTP and HTTPS)” for your front-end protocol, you must specify an SSL/TLS certificate on your load balancer. The load balancer uses the certificate to terminate the connection and then decrypt requests from clients before sending them to the nodes.

The SSL and TLS protocols use an X.509 certificate (SSL/TLS server certificate) to authenticate both the client and the back-end application. An X.509 certificate is a digital form of identification issued by a certificate authority (CA). It contains identification information, a validity period, a public key, a serial number, and the digital signature of the issuer. Please enter the following information:

  • Name: You need to enter the SSL bundle name which is a string of characters to be provided for saving your SSL certificates.

  • SSL Certificate: An SSL certificate is a type of digital certificate that provides authentication for a website and enables an encrypted connection. SSL certificates are what would allow websites to move from HTTP to HTTPS, which is more secure. You can paste the content of your SSL certificate file or can load it from a file via a click on the “Load from file” link.

  • SSL Private Key: The private key is a separate file and used for the encryption/decryption of data sent between your server and the connecting clients. You can paste the content of the private key, or you can load it from a file via a click on the “Load from file” link.

  • SSL Certificate Chain: A certificate chain is a list of certificates (usually starting with an end-entity certificate) followed by one or more CA certificates (often the last one being a self-signed certificate). SSL certificate file is not required to be included in this chain. You can paste the content of your intermediate/CA certificates chain or can load it from a file via a click on the “Load from file” link.

loadbalancer/images/ssl_certificate.png

Note

If a trusted CA didn’t issue the certificate, the connecting device (e.g. a web browser) checks to see if a trusted CA issued the certificate of the issuing CA. It continues monitoring until either a trusted CA is found (at which point a trusted, secure connection established), or no trusted CA can be located (at which point the device will usually display an error).

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

Select Redirect HTTP to HTTPS checkbox, If you use “HTTPS (SSL or TLS)” for your front-end protocol of load balancer. For your web user safety, accessibility or PCI compliance, it becomes essential to enable redirect from HTTP to HTTPS to redirect all your traffic to LB from HTTP to HTTPS.

Load Balancer Connection Port

  • Specify the Port - The port number which automatically displayed according to the selection of protocol for frontend connections. Load balancers can listen on the ports: 1-65535.

The load balancer will accept HTTP requests on port 80 if you have set HTTP protocol Or it will accept HTTPS requests on port 443 if you have set HTTPS protocol for front-end (client to load balancer) connections.

Backend Configuration

In the List Type, you can select either Node(Static IPs) or Dynamic Scale Group (for Auto-scaling group nodes only) to configure backend connection of your load balancer as per your requirement.

../_images/list_type_selection.png

Node(Static IPs)

Registering an E2E node adds it to your load balancer. The load balancer continuously monitors the health of registered nodes and routes requests to the nodes that are healthy. You can register or deregister nodes with the load balancer to handle the demand.

  • Select the Node(Static IPs) in the list type field. The node details section will be displayed.

  • In the Node Details section, you need to specify the details of the virtual nodes you wish to register behind the Load Balancer. For this, please enter the node’s name, node’s IP(preferably private IP if the backend node created on E2E cloud), and specify the port to which you want to send/receive traffic via Load Balancer.

  • You can use the ‘+ Add node’ button to add more node detail to the load balancer.

../_images/node_detail_section.png

Dynamic Scale Group

Registering your Auto Scaling group with a load balancer helps you set up a load-balanced application because EAS enables you to dynamically scale compute nodes based on varying workloads and defined policy. Using this feature, you can meet the seasonal or varying demands of infrastructure while optimising the cost and distributing incoming traffic across your healthy E2E nodes—the scalability and availability of your application increases.

  • Select the Dynamic Scale group in the list type field. The node details section will be displayed.

  • In the Scale Group Details section, you need to select an application scaling group from the dropdown list you wish to register behind the Load Balancer.

  • After selecting the scale group, define the port to which you want to send/receive traffic via Load Balancer in Target Port field.

../_images/Dynamic_Scaling2.png

Health Check

  • Select Add HTTP Health Checks checkbox to define an HTTP based monitoring for the health of your backend nodes.

  • You need to define a URL path to which HTTP HEAD requests will send to fetch the response code. If the backend node responds with 2xx or 3xx HTTP status code for the defined URL path, it will mark as UP; else DOWN.

../_images/HTTP_healthcheck.png

Note

The default URL path is / which means the index page of your site/application hosted on the backend nodes, and it can be changed to any other URI path as well.

  • By default, Load Balancer checks the connectivity to the backend-nodes/Target port defined during creation to mark a backend node up or down for it.

  • If any node is down/unresponsive, traffic will not send to that particular node. The removal of unresponsive nodes and their re-addition on successful health checks are automatically taken care of by the Load Balancer appliance.

Network

Use Reserve IP - Enable this option to use a reserved IP as default Public IP for your load balancer. For example, you can dynamically update the backend resources of your applications and websites by re-assigning the reserved IP address without a downtime.

../_images/reserve_IP.png

Security

Enable Bitninja - Enable this option to use a bitninja security tool for your load balancer. BitNinja has different modules for different aspects of cyberattacks. It is super easy-to-install, requires virtually no maintenance and able to protect any server by providing immediate protection against a wide range of cyberattacks.

../_images/LB_security.png

Deploy Load Balancer

  • After filling all the details successfully, click on the Deploy button. It will take a few minutes to set up the scale group and you will take to the ‘Manage Load Balancers’ page.

FAQ’s

What protocols are supported by Load Balancer Appliance?

Currently, the Load Balancer supports HTTP and HTTPS protocols. TCP protocol support will be added in the future.

Which backend operating systems do a Load Balancer support?

Any backend server with operating systems currently supported by the E2E Networks Myaccount Cloud Platform can be added behind the Load Balancer Appliance.

Do Load Balancer support SSL termination?

Yes. You will get a section to define your SSL certificate details on selecting HTTPS protocol.

Can I upgrade or downgrade my Load Balancer plan?

Yes, you can upgrade or downgrade your Load Balancer plan by sending a request to cloud-platform@e2enetworks.com with the details of the new plan required and our support team will assist you with the process.

Does Load Balancer SupportsHTTP/2?

Currently, the HTTP/2 support part is in the testing phase and expected to be available in our next release.

Is there any limit on the number of backend Servers?

No, there is no limit on the number of backend servers and you can add as many backend servers as you like behind your Load Balancer Appliance.

Is IPv6 supported on Load Balancer Appliance?

No, currently IPv6 is not supported on Load Balancer Appliance. However, it’s already in our roadmap and will be available in a future release.