News

The content has been bookmarked!

There was an error bookmarking this content! Please retry.

Rackspace Load Balancers beta

Posted by James Vastbinder on Feb 25, 2011

Sections: Operations & Infrastructure,; Architecture & Design
Topics: Load Balancers ,; PaaS ,; Operations ,; Load Balancing ,; Infrastructure ,; Cloud Computing ,; Rackspace ,; Architecture ,; Performance & Scalability

Yesterday Josh Odom announced the beta release of Cloud Load Balancers for the Rackspace cloud computing stack. This release comes with their Fanatical Support and a documented API for implementation and management load balancing on their stack, Cloud Servers.

The Details

Each load balancer is assigned a static IP address that can be shared with other load balancers under a single account. For the duration of time a load balancer is active, all IP addresses are persistent and do not change. Supported load balancing algorithms are round robin, weighted round robin, least connections, weighted least connections, and random. Connection throttling is also supported through user defined limits on the number of connections per IP address.

Load Balancers also provides built-in health status checks by routinely inspecting HTTP response codes and if a node experiences failure, the load balancer quickly checks and removes the node from the rotation. Session persistence is maintained via an HTTP cookie and all requests are directed to the same node in a load balancer pool.

Connection logging is Apache-style for HTTP traffic and simple connection/transfer logging for all other traffic. Raw data for debugging and performance tuning are made available via logs which are sorted, aggregated and delivered via Cloud Files.

The Cloud Load Balancers supports multiple protocols:

HTTP / HTTPS
LDAP / LDAPS
IMAP
FTP
POP3 / POP3S
SMTP

Support and Documentation

As this is a beta release, it is not yet supported by the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel and only via the programmatic API. However, it does with with full Fanatical Support and the API is available here.