I've previously blogged about how to get TPROXY and HAProxy working nicely together, but what if you want to terminate SSL traffic on the load balancer to use HAProxy to insert cookies in the standard HTTP stream to the backend servers?
For a company touting the use of load balancers for high availability, it is important that our own website should be up!
Some vendors make a fair bit of hype about their products enabling 99.999% availability out of the box.
If you use HAProxy as the load balancer then all of the backend servers see the traffic coming from the IP address of the load balancer.
Standard Kernel builds of LVS (Linux Virtual Server) don't have the ability to load balance traffic that is from the local node.
One of the (many) traditional problems with load balancing is the requirement to change your infrastructure in order to implement a hardware load balancer.
I was reading a post by Tony Bourke 'license to SSL' about the licensing restrictions of Verisign et al. when it comes to web sites running on clusters.
Direct Routing aka. Direct Server Return (DSR) aka. N-Path is a great load balancing method. And it is, without doubt, the fastest method possible.
Hardware marketing execs get very excited about the fact that their product can magically scale your application by using ‘amazing Layer 7 technology’ in the load balancer such as cookie inserts and tracking/re-writing.