Ben is our Cloud expert continually working to find new ideas that we can add to our Enterprise AWS or Enterprise Azure cloud products here at Loadbalancer.org. When out of the office he is normally found floating around on a kayak.
The Loadbalancer.org Feedback Agent is installed on the Session Host servers to provide real time performance stats to enable optimum load distribution.
We decided that we would like to be able to change server states and bring them online, offline or drain them. So asking Alexa to do this would look like “Alexa ask Val to change status of website1 to drain”. So we started work with this as our goal.
HAProxy is an excellent choice if you need layer 7 functionality, but its a full reverse-proxy, so the application thinks that all of the traffic is coming from HAProxys IP - rather than the clients.
The Loadbalancer.org for AWS appliance will monitor auto scaling groups, update configs based on auto scaling events and add/remove servers.
One of our favorite methods of load balancing is using Layer 4 DR because it is transparent and fast. Unfortunately, because of Amazon's infrastructure, this is not possible in EC2 so we need to use another method which means we are left with layer 4 NAT and transparent HAproxy using TProxy.
The ideal way to monitor the health of the real servers is to to have a dedicated monitoring system in place such as Nagios. However this isn’t always an option, so for some they require the loadbalancer to send an alert.