Use a load balancer

Use a load balancer¶

Once you’ve joined multiple manager nodes for high availability (HA), you can configure your own load balancer to balance user requests across all manager nodes.

This allows users to access UCP using a centralized domain name. If a manager node goes down, the load balancer can detect that and stop forwarding requests to that node, so that the failure goes unnoticed by users.

Load-balancing on UCP¶

Since UCP uses mutual TLS, make sure you configure your load balancer to:

Load-balance TCP traffic on ports 443 and 6443.
Not terminate HTTPS connections.
Use the /_ping endpoint on each manager node, to check if the node is healthy and if it should remain on the load balancing pool or not.

Load balancing UCP and DTR¶

By default, both UCP and DTR use port 443. If you plan on deploying UCP and DTR, your load balancer needs to distinguish traffic between the two by IP address or port number.

If you want to configure your load balancer to listen on port 443:
- Use one load balancer for UCP, and another for DTR,
- Use the same load balancer with multiple virtual IPs.
Configure your load balancer to expose UCP or DTR on a port other than 443.

Important

Additional requirements

In addition to configuring your load balancer to distinguish between UCP and DTR, configuring a load balancer for DTR has further requirements (refer to the DTR documentation).

Configuration examples¶

Use the following examples to configure your load balancer for UCP.

user  nginx;
   worker_processes  1;

   error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
   pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

   events {
      worker_connections  1024;
   }

   stream {
      upstream ucp_443 {
         server <UCP_MANAGER_1_IP>:443 max_fails=2 fail_timeout=30s;
         server <UCP_MANAGER_2_IP>:443 max_fails=2 fail_timeout=30s;
         server <UCP_MANAGER_N_IP>:443  max_fails=2 fail_timeout=30s;
      }
      server {
         listen 443;
         proxy_pass ucp_443;
      }
   }
   

global
      log /dev/log    local0
      log /dev/log    local1 notice

   defaults
         mode    tcp
         option  dontlognull
         timeout connect     5s
         timeout client      50s
         timeout server      50s
         timeout tunnel      1h
         timeout client-fin  50s
   ### frontends
   # Optional HAProxy Stats Page accessible at http://<host-ip>:8181/haproxy?stats
   frontend ucp_stats
         mode http
         bind 0.0.0.0:8181
         default_backend ucp_stats
   frontend ucp_443
         mode tcp
         bind 0.0.0.0:443
         default_backend ucp_upstream_servers_443
   ### backends
   backend ucp_stats
         mode http
         option httplog
         stats enable
         stats admin if TRUE
         stats refresh 5m
   backend ucp_upstream_servers_443
         mode tcp
         option httpchk GET /_ping HTTP/1.1\r\nHost:\ <UCP_FQDN>
         server node01 <UCP_MANAGER_1_IP>:443 weight 100 check check-ssl verify none
         server node02 <UCP_MANAGER_2_IP>:443 weight 100 check check-ssl verify none
         server node03 <UCP_MANAGER_N_IP>:443 weight 100 check check-ssl verify none
   

{
      "Subnets": [
         "subnet-XXXXXXXX",
         "subnet-YYYYYYYY",
         "subnet-ZZZZZZZZ"
      ],
      "CanonicalHostedZoneNameID": "XXXXXXXXXXX",
      "CanonicalHostedZoneName": "XXXXXXXXX.us-west-XXX.elb.amazonaws.com",
      "ListenerDescriptions": [
         {
               "Listener": {
                  "InstancePort": 443,
                  "LoadBalancerPort": 443,
                  "Protocol": "TCP",
                  "InstanceProtocol": "TCP"
               },
               "PolicyNames": []
         }
      ],
      "HealthCheck": {
         "HealthyThreshold": 2,
         "Interval": 10,
         "Target": "HTTPS:443/_ping",
         "Timeout": 2,
         "UnhealthyThreshold": 4
      },
      "VPCId": "vpc-XXXXXX",
      "BackendServerDescriptions": [],
      "Instances": [
         {
               "InstanceId": "i-XXXXXXXXX"
         },
         {
               "InstanceId": "i-XXXXXXXXX"
         },
         {
               "InstanceId": "i-XXXXXXXXX"
         }
      ],
      "DNSName": "XXXXXXXXXXXX.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com",
      "SecurityGroups": [
         "sg-XXXXXXXXX"
      ],
      "Policies": {
         "LBCookieStickinessPolicies": [],
         "AppCookieStickinessPolicies": [],
         "OtherPolicies": []
      },
      "LoadBalancerName": "ELB-UCP",
      "CreatedTime": "2017-02-13T21:40:15.400Z",
      "AvailabilityZones": [
         "us-west-2c",
         "us-west-2a",
         "us-west-2b"
      ],
      "Scheme": "internet-facing",
      "SourceSecurityGroup": {
         "OwnerAlias": "XXXXXXXXXXXX",
         "GroupName":  "XXXXXXXXXXXX"
      }
   }
   

You can deploy your load balancer using:

NGINX
HAProxy

# Create the nginx.conf file, then
  # deploy the load balancer
  
  docker run --detach \
  --name ucp-lb \
  --restart=unless-stopped \
  --publish 443:443 \
  --volume ${PWD}/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:ro \
  nginx:stable-alpine
  

# Create the haproxy.cfg file, then
  # deploy the load balancer
  
  docker run --detach \
  --name ucp-lb \
  --publish 443:443 \
  --publish 8181:8181 \
  --restart=unless-stopped \
  --volume ${PWD}/haproxy.cfg:/usr/local/etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg:ro \
  haproxy:1.7-alpine haproxy -d -f /usr/local/etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg
  

updated: 2023-07-26 11:20

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