Summary

Hopefully, this chapter has served as a good introduction to load balancers, how to deploy them, and the reasons you might choose to make various design and implementation decisions around them.

If you used new VMs to follow along with the examples in this chapter, we won't need them in subsequent chapters, but you might wish to keep the HAProxy VMs in particular if you need an example to reference later. If you followed the examples in this chapter just by reading them, then the examples in this chapter remain available to you. Either way, as you read this chapter, I hope you were mentally working out how load balancers might fit into your organization's internal or perimeter architecture.

With this chapter completed, you should have the skills needed to build a load balancer in any organization. These skills were discussed in the context of the (free) version of HAProxy, but the design and implementation considerations are almost all directly usable in any...