Serving applications using a load balancer

So far, you have learned how to deploy applications to multiple servers using Ansible with all the necessary prerequisites, dependencies, and basic health checks. But if the application or website is running on multiple servers, then you will need to tell the end user about multiple servers so that they can access the website. It is a best practice to serve the application from a single entity such as a load balancer, as shown in the following diagram, so that the end user doesn’t need to know the actual web or application server IP addresses. It will also help you implement high availability and rolling updates for the application:

Figure 9.15 – Website hosted on multiple servers with a load balancer

Since we are handling the application deployment using Ansible inside the CI/CD workflow, we can include the load balancer installation and configuration tasks inside the pipeline, as shown in the following...