I had a project I was working on where I needed a private load balancer to use on Amazon Web Services. Unfortunately, AWS Elastic Load Balancers do not support private listeners so I needed to make my own load balancer using Linux.
Making a load balancer is pretty straight forward. The challenge was that the instances under it were auto-scaling and there was no built-in mechanism for the load balancer to know to send traffic to new instances and to stop sending traffic to deleted instances.
Enter haproxy-autoscale. This is a wrapper of sorts that will automatically add all instances in a security group that are currently in a running state to the haproxy configuration. It then restarts haproxy in a manner which gracefully terminates connections so there is no downtime. Also, haproxy will only be restarted if there are changes. If there are no changes in the isntances that should be sent traffic then it just exits.
I've actually bundled the haproxy binary with this repo to make things easier when getting started.
The update-haproxy.py script does a good job with basic setups using the default options but as things get more complex you may want to get more specific with the paramters. For instance, if you decide to run multiple instances at the same time then you should probably specifify different templates, outputs and pid files for each.
Run sudo python setup.py install and if everything goes well you're ready to
configure (if you have complex needs) and run the update-haproxy.py command.
Most of the configuration is done via command line options. The only configuration that may need to be done is the haproxy.cfg template. You can customize it to suit your needs or you can specify a different on on the command line. Make sure to read the existing template to see what variables will be available to use.
haproxy-autoscale was designed to be run from the load balancer itself as a cron job. Ideally it would be run every minute.
update-haproxy.py [-h] --security-group SECURITY_GROUP --access-key
ACCESS_KEY --secret-key SECRET_KEY [--output OUTPUT]
[--template TEMPLATE] [--haproxy HAPROXY] [--pid PID]
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--security-group SECURITY_GROUP
--access-key ACCESS_KEY
--secret-key SECRET_KEY
--output OUTPUT Defaults to haproxy.cfg.
--template TEMPLATE Defaults to templates/haproxy.cfg.
--haproxy HAPROXY The haproxy binary to call. Defaults to haproxy.
--pid PID The pid file for haproxy. Defaults to
/var/run/haproxy.pid.
Example:
/usr/bin/python update-haproxy.py --access-key='SOMETHING' --secret-key='SoMeThInGeLsE' --security-group='webheads'