Introduction to the OVHcloud Load Balancer
Find out more about the OVHcloud Load Balancer solution
Last updated 17th January 2018
Objective
The new OVHcloud Load Balancer is a reliable service, with versatile configurations. You just need to configure your products with the OVHcloud Load Balancer, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Find out more about the brand-new OVHcloud Load Balancer solution.
Requirements
- No specific requirements.
Instructions
This new solution is based on robust open-source solutions: HAProxy for TCP traffic, and Nginx for UDP traffic.
There are no limits to what you can do! The new OVHcloud Load Balancer solution can be used to work with a variety of protocols:
| Type | Description | Advantages | Technology |
|---|---|---|---|
| HTTP | All HTTP/HTTPS web services | Optimised for L7 (application layer) processing | HAProxy |
| TCP | For any network services that aren’t HTTP | Supports all TCP applications | HAProxy |
| UDP | For all UDP traffic types | Supports all UDP applications | Nginx |
With this new solution, you will get:
- OVHcloud anti-DDoS protection
- your services replicated worldwide (Anycast)
- advanced HTTP/HTTPS support (redirections, headers, ACL, etc.)
- a service compatible with an Additional IP
- vRack supported
- redundancy - your Load Balancer functions on separate instances, working individually on isolated, redundant hardware
Basic parts
- The new OVHcloud Load Balancer solution is made up of three basic parts:
| Basic parts | Function |
|---|---|
| Front-end | The front-end defines the protocol type (HTTP/TCP/UDP) of the OVHcloud Load Balancer service. This part also has the service’s listening port |
| Farm | The farm receives the incoming traffic from the front-end. This part takes care of the load balancing |
| Server | These are the servers that receive the final traffic, and respond via the application |
With these three basic parts that make up the Load Balancer, you can configure it to use nearly all possible load balancing methods.
Why use the OVHcloud Load Balancer?
Balance the load
This is the basic function of a load balancer, but the OVHcloud Load Balancer offers much more.
Eliminate downtime
The OVHcloud Load Balancer service can automatically detect when a server is not responding. When this happens, it redirects incoming traffic to another server, if possible. This resolves the problem without affecting your website.
Scale your infrastructure easily
You can add or remove farms, front-ends or servers from the OVHcloud Load Balancer solution without interrupting your service.
Make maintenance easier
If there is any maintenance scheduled for your solution, you can now easily place a farm in downtime mode to prevent it from receiving traffic. If you need to do this, it’s easy to add your server again once the maintenance has finished.
Combine your services
You can now combine various OVHcloud services in the Load Balancer, for example:
- Public Cloud instances with Additional IPs
- VPS with Additional IPs
- Dedicated servers with Additional IPs
- vRacks
Anycast
You can balance your load across a variety of geographical zones.
Distribute any kind of traffic
The OVHcloud Load Balancer doesn’t just work with HTTP traffic any more! You can now use it with all TCP and UDP traffic types.
Email server
Balance the load between your email servers.
Databases
Balance your databases, and make them redundant.
Go further
Find out more about load balancing.
Join our community of users on https://community.ovh.com/en/.
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