Overview

The Nectar Research Cloud supports Load Balancer-as-a-Service (LBaaS) for projects.

Conceptually, a load balancer is a service that accepts client requests and then directs those requests on to servers within a pool that are able to satisfy that request.

When building scalable web architectures, load balancing is especially useful for fault tolerance and mitigating bottlenecks by allowing the load to spread across multiple backend servers and to be able to direct the requests to only servers that are deemed as healthy.

In this tutorial, we will explore the Nectar Research Cloud’s Load Balancer service and create a simple, scalable web architecture.

Advanced networking concepts
This tutorial relies on pre-requisite knowledge of some advanced networking concepts. It is highly recommended that you complete the Advanced Networking tutorial before this one.

If you wish to use the Load Balancing service, you’ll need to apply for Load Balancer and Floating IP quota for your project. This can be done through the Nectar Research Cloud Dashboard, under the Allocations section for either new projects or as an amendment of requirements for existing projects.

What you’ll learn

• Concepts of load balancing
• How to create a simple, scalable web architecture

What you’ll need

• A project with Load Balancer and Floating IP quota
• OpenStack command line tools installed for your platform