Chapter 7. Load Balancing Traffic in Neutron
The Neutron load balancing as a service extension, known as LBaaS, provides the ability to load balance traffic to applications running on virtual instances in the cloud. Neutron provides an API to manage virtual IPs, pools, pool members, and health monitors. First introduced in Grizzly, the Havana release of LBaaS offers numerous bug fixes and features over its predecessor but is not as polished as other Neutron services.
In this chapter, I will discuss fundamental load balancer concepts, including:
- Virtual IPs, pools, and pool members
- Load balancing algorithms
- Monitors
- Persistence
- Integrating load balancers in the network
LBaaS uses drivers to interact with hardware and software load balancers. In Havana, the default driver uses haproxy. Haproxy is a free, open source load balancer that is available for most Unix-based operating systems. Third-party drivers are supported by LBaaS but are outside the scope of this book.
