Managing load balancers
Neutron includes a service known as Load Balancing as-a-Service (LBaaS), which provides users with the ability to create load balancers that balance traffic to applications deployed across instances in the cloud. In a reference architecture, Neutron relies on an open source load balancing package known as HAProxy to provide the load balancing functionality. Much like the Neutron L3 agent handles virtual routers and the DHCP agent handles virtual DHCP servers, the Neutron LBaaS agent handles the construction and configuration of virtual load balancers upon request.
Note
LBaaS should not be confused with another load balancing project known as Octavia. Both provide similar load balancing functions, but only LBaaS is covered here.
There are three major components to a load balancer in OpenStack:
Pool members
Pools
Listeners
A pool member describes a layer 4 object that is composed of the IP address and port of a service residing on an instance. For example, a pool member might...
