Load Balancer Setup
Table of Contents
Overview
Deploy and configure load balancers to distribute traffic across multiple backend servers, ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, and optimal resource utilization across your infrastructure.
When to Use
- Multi-server traffic distribution
- High availability and failover
- Session persistence and sticky sessions
- Health checking and auto-recovery
- SSL/TLS termination
- Cross-region load balancing
- API rate limiting at load balancer
- DDoS mitigation
Quick Start
Minimal working example:
# /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg
global
log stdout local0
log stdout local1 notice
maxconn 4096
daemon
# Security
tune.ssl.default-dh-param 2048
ssl-default-bind-ciphers ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
ssl-default-bind-options ssl-min-ver TLSv1.2
defaults
log global
mode http
option httplog
option denylogin
option forwardfor
option http-server-close
# Timeouts
timeout connect 5000
timeout client 50000
timeout server 50000
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)Reference Guides
Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:
| Guide | Contents |
|---|---|
| HAProxy Configuration | HAProxy Configuration |
| AWS Application Load Balancer (CloudFormation) | AWS Application Load Balancer (CloudFormation) |
| Load Balancer Health Check Script | Load Balancer Health Check Script |
| Load Balancer Monitoring | Load Balancer Monitoring |
Best Practices
✅ DO
- Implement health checks
- Use connection pooling
- Enable session persistence when needed
- Monitor load balancer metrics
- Implement rate limiting
- Use multiple availability zones
- Enable SSL/TLS termination
- Implement graceful connection draining
❌ DON'T
- Allow single point of failure
- Skip health check configuration
- Mix HTTP and HTTPS without redirect
- Ignore backend server limits
- Over-provision without monitoring
- Cache sensitive responses
- Use default security groups
- Neglect backup load balancers