Summary

Load Balancing as a Service provides users with the ability to scale their application programmatically through the Neutron API. Users can balance traffic to pools consisting of multiple application servers and provide high availability of their application through the use of intelligent health monitors.

The reference plugin based on HAProxy offers a functionality that can address basic load balancing needs and may be enough for most environments. Major limitations found in version 1 of the LBaaS API, such as the inability to create multiple virtual servers using the same IP address and different layer 4 ports, the lack of SSL offloading support, and the lack of advanced layer 7 load balancing methods, are addressed by version 2 and integration with other OpenStack projects, such as Barbican.

In the next chapter, we will take a look at another advanced service provided by Neutron known as Firewall as a Service, which can be used to implement virtual firewalls at the edge of tenant...