Load-Balancing Policy¶

Properties¶

The design of the load-balancing policy faithfully follows the interface and properties exposed by the LBaaS v2 service. A sample spec is shown below:

type: senlin.policy.loadbalance
version: 1.1
properties:
  pool:
    protocol: HTTP
    protocol_port: 80
    subnet: private_subnet
    lb_method: ROUND_ROBIN
    admin_state_up: true
    session_persistence:
      type: HTTP_COOKIE
      cookie_name: my_cookie
  vip:
    subnet: public_subnet
    address: 12.34.56.78
    connection_limit: 5000
    protocol: HTTP
    protocol_port: 80
    admin_state_up: true
  health_monitor:
    type: HTTP
    delay: 20
    timeout: 5
    max_retries: 3
    admin_state_up: true
    http_method: GET
    url_path: /health
    expected_codes: 200
  lb_status_timeout: 300

As you can see, there are many properties related to the policy. The good news is that for most of them, there are reasonable default values. All properties are optional except for the following few:

• pool.subnet: This property provides the name or ID of the subnet for the port on which nodes can be connected.
• vip.subnet: This property provides the name or ID of the subnet on which the virtual IP (VIP) is allocated.

The following subsections describe each and every group of properties and the general rules on using them.

Note that you can create and configure load-balancers all by yourself when you have a good reason to do so. However, by using the load-balancing policy, you no longer have to manage the load-balancer’s lifecycle manually and you don’t have to update the load-balancer manually when cluster membership changes.

Load Balancer Pools¶

The load balancer pool is managed automatically when you have a load-balancing policy attached to a cluster. The policy automatically adds existing nodes to the load balancer pool when attaching the policy. Later on, when new nodes are added to the cluster (e.g. by cluster scaling) or existing nodes are removed from the cluster, the policy will update the pool’s status to reflect the change in membership.

Each pool is supposed to use the same protocol and the same port number for load sharing. By default, the protocol (i.e. pool.protocol) is set to “HTTP” which can be customized to “HTTPS” or “TCP” in your setup. The default port number is 80, which also can be modified to suit your service configuration.

All nodes in a pool are supposed to reside on the same subnet, and the subnet specified in the pool.subnet property must be compatible to the subnets of existing nodes.

The LBaaS service is capable of load balance among nodes in different ways which are collectively called the lb_method. Valid values for this property are:

• ROUND_ROBIN: The load balancer will select a node for workload handling on a round-robin basis. Each node gets an equal pressure to handle workloads.
• LEAST_CONNECTIONS: The load balancer will choose a node based on the number of established connections from client. The node will the lowest number of connections will be chosen.
• SOURCE_IP: The load balancer will compute hash values based on the IP addresses of the clients and the server and then use the hash value for routing. This ensures the requests from the same client always go to the same server even in the face of broken connections.

The pool.admin_state_up property for the most time can be safely ignored. It is useful only when you want to debug the details of a load-balancer.

The last property that needs some attention is pool.session_persistence which is used to persist client sessions even if the connections may break now and then. There are three types of session persistence supported:

• SOURCE_IP: The load balancer will try resume a broken connection based on the client’s IP address. You don’t have to configure the cookie_name property in this case.
• HTTP_COOKIE: The load balancer will check a named, general HTTP cookie using the name specified in the cookie_name property and then resume the connection based on the cookie contents.
• APP_COOKIE: The load balancer will check the application specific cookie using the name specified in the cookie_name and resume connection based on the cookie contents.

Virtual IP¶

The Virtual IP (or “VIP” for short) refers to the IP address visible from the client side. It is the single IP address used by all clients to access the application or service running on the pool nodes. You have to specify a value for the vip.subnet property even though you don’t have a preference about the actual VIP allocated. However, if you do have a preferred VIP address to use, you will need to provide both vip.subnet and vip.address values. The LBaaS service will check if both values are valid.

Note that if you choose to omit the vip.address property, the LBaaS service will allocate an address for you from the provided subnet. You will have to check the cluster’s data property after the load-balancing policy has been successfully attached to your cluster. For example:

$ openstack cluster show my_cluster

+------------------+------------------------------------------------+
| Field            | Value                                          |
+------------------+------------------------------------------------+
| created_at       | 2017-01-21T06:25:42Z                           |
| data             | {                                              |
|                  |   "loadbalancers": {                           |
|                  |     "1040ad51-87e8-4579-873b-0f420aa0d273": {  |
|                  |       "vip_address": "11.22.33.44"             |
|                  |     }                                          |
|                  |   }                                            |
|                  | }                                              |
| dependents       | {}                                             |
| desired_capacity | 10                                             |
| domain_id        | None                                           |
| id               | 30d7ef94-114f-4163-9120-412b78ba38bb           |
| ...              | ...                                            |

The output above shows you that the cluster has a load-balancer created for you and the VIP used to access that cluster is “11.22.33.44”.

Similar to the pool properties discussed in previous subsection, for the virtual IP address, you can also specify the expected network protocol and port number to use where clients will be accessing it. The default value for vip.protocol is “HTTP” and the default port number is 80. Both can be customized to suit your needs.

Another useful feature provided by the LBaaS service is the cap of maximum number of connections per second. This is a limit set on a per-VIP basis. By default, Senlin sets the vip.connection_limit to -1 which means there is no upper bound for connection numbers. You may want to customize this value to restrict the number of connection requests per second for your service.

The last property in the vip group is admin_state_up which is default to “True”. In some rare cases, you may want to set it to “False” for the purpose of debugging.

Health Monitor¶

Since a load-balancer sits in front of all nodes in a pool, it has to be aware of the health status of all member nodes so as to properly and reliably route client requests to the active nodes for processing. The problem is that there are so many different applications or web services each exhibit a different runtime behavior. It is hard to come up with an approach generic and powerful enough to detect all kinds of node failures.

The LBaaS that backs the Senlin load-balancing policy supports four types of node failure detections, all generic enough to serve a wide range of applications.

• PING: The load-balancer pings every pool members to detect if they are still reachable.
• TCP: The load-balancer attempts a telnet connection to the protocol port configured for the pool thus determines if a node is still alive.
• HTTP: The load-balancer attempts a HTTP request (specified in the health_monitor.http_method property) to specific URL (configured in the health_monitor.url_path property) and then determines if a node is still active by comparing the result code to the expected value (configured in the health_monitor.expected_codes.
• HTTPS: The load-balancer checks nodes’ aliveness by sending a HTTPS request using the same values as those in the case of HTTP.

The health_monitor.expected_codes field accepts a string value, but you can specify multiple HTTP status codes that can be treated as an indicator of node’s aliveness:

• A single value, such as 200;
• A list of values separated by commas, such as 200, 202;
• A range of values, such as 200-204.

To make the failure detection reliable, you may want to check and customize the following properties in the health_monitor group.

• timeout: The maximum time in milliseconds that a monitor waits for a response from a node before it claims the node unreachable. The default is 5.
• max_retries: The number of allowed connection failures before the monitor concludes that node inactive. The default is 3.
• delay: The time in milliseconds between sending two consecutive requests (probes) to pool members. The default is 10.

A careful experimentation is usually warranted to come up with reasonable values for these fields in a specific environment.

LB Status Timeout¶

Due to the way the LBaaS service is implemented, creating load balancers and health monitors, updating load balancer pools all take considerable time. In some deployment scenarios, it make take the load balancer several minutes to become operative again after an update operation.

The lb_status_timeout option is provided since version 1.1 of the load-balancing policy to mitigate this effect. In real production environment, you are expected to set this value based on some careful dry-runs.

Validation¶

When creating a new load-balancing policy object, Senlin checks if the subnet provided are actually known to the Neutron network service. Or else, the policy creation will fail.

Updates to the Cluster and Nodes¶

When a load-balancing policy has been successfully attached to a cluster, you can observe the VIP address from the data property of the cluster, as described above.

You can also check the data property of nodes in the cluster. Each node will have a lb_member key in its data property indicating the ID of the said node in the load-balancer pool.

When the load-balancing policy is detached from a cluster successfully. These data will be automatically removed, and the related resources created at the LBaaS side are deleted transparently.

Node Deletion¶

In the case where there is a Deletion Policy attached to the same cluster, the deletion policy will elect the victims to be removed from a cluster before the load-balancing policy gets a chance to remove those nodes from the load-balancing pool.

However, when there is no such a deletion policy in place, the load-balancing policy will try to figure out the number of nodes to delete (if needed) and randomly choose the victim nodes for deletion.