Adding a Load Balancer
Overview
A load balancer is used to distribute traffic across your web servers, and offers benefits such as maximizing throughput, minimizing response times and avoiding overload on any single server.
Cloud 66 integrates native cloud load balancers - in other words those provisioned directly by cloud providers. It is still possible to set up a load balancer manually, but this is not integrated into the workflow of the dashboard as described below.
Adding a load balancer
To add a load balancer to your application:
- Open the Application Overview from the Dashboard.
- Click Explore Add-ins or the green + in the Add-ins panel
- Click on Install Now under Load Balancer
- A pop-up window will appear, explaining the process for your cloud provider. Click Add Load Balancer to continue.
You can now watch the logs, as usual to see the progress of the process.
The time required to set up your load balancer will depend on which cloud provider you use. Once your load balancer is set up, it will be ready to distribute the load between your web servers. All your existing web servers will automatically be added to the load balancer.
Note
This feature is only available if you have deployed using a cloud vendor, and for non-development applications.
Load balancer configuration
Depending on which cloud provider you use, your load balancer will be set up differently:
- Amazon AWS: Elastic Load Balancing
- DigitalOcean: HAProxy
- Google Cloud Engine: Forwarding rules, target pools & health checks
- Linode: NodeBalancer
- Microsoft Azure: TrafficManager
- Rackspace: Rackspace Load Balancing
- CloudA: Load Balancing as a service
The time required to set up your load balancer will depend on which cloud provider you use.
What’s next?
- Learn how to set up your DNS records to work with Maestro
- Learn how to add a Failover Group to your application, to further improve resilience.
- Learn how to add a firewall rule to your application.
