Deploying a load balancer from scratch and adding backend servers

Load balancing is a key and Major part of IT infrastructure and this is because the High availability and efficient performance of webservers are very important. The purpose of load balancing is to prevent a server from being overloaded and maintaining healthy servers by balancing incoming requests. A Load Balancer is Available, reliable, and a highly scalable web application. Furthermore, In this tutorial, I will deploy one Haproxy server and 2 backend servers in a Lab environment. However, in a subsequent post, I will show how to configure, deploy and troubleshoot an ELB on cloud platforms.

NOTE: All deployments are done on CentOS 8.

Installing and configuring HAproxy

Yum -y install Haproxy

NOTE: Back up the default config file, should anything go wrong, we can revert.

mv /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg-bak

create a new haproxy config file and paste the following

vim /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg

#———————————————————————
global
log 127.0.0.1 local2
chroot /var/lib/haproxy
pidfile /var/run/haproxy.pid
maxconn 4000
user haproxy
group haproxy
daemon
# turn on stats unix socket
stats socket /var/lib/haproxy/stats
# utilize system-wide crypto-policies
ssl-default-bind-ciphers PROFILE=SYSTEM
ssl-default-server-ciphers PROFILE=SYSTEM
#———————————————————————
defaults
mode http
log global
option httplog
option dontlognull
option http-server-close
option forwardfor except 127.0.0.0/8
option redispatch
retries 3
timeout http-request 10s
timeout queue 1m
timeout connect 10s
timeout client 1m
timeout server 1m
timeout http-keep-alive 10s
timeout check 10s
maxconn 3000
# main frontend which proxys to the backends
frontend haproxy_balancer # define the name of the frontend.
bind 192.168.0.10:80 # IP address of HAProxy server
option http-server-close
option forwardfor
stats uri /haproxy?stats # Specify the HAProxy status page.
default_backend webservers
# round robin balancing between the various backends
backend webservers # Specify a name for identifying an application
mode http
balance roundrobin # defines the roundrobin load balancer scheduling algorithm
option httpchk HEAD / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost:\ localhost
server nginx-web1 192.168.0.11:80 check # IP address of the first backend server
server nginx-web2 192.168.0.12:80 check # IP address of the second backend server

NOTE: Kindly change the Mode and the server IPs as specified based on your configurations

Test the configuration for errors

haproxy -c -f /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg

Start and Enable the Haproxy service

Checking the HAproxy status

Open the Web Url of your front end server http://IP_address/

Check Statistics and status of Haproxy: http://IP_address/haproxy?stats

Now you can keep adding backend servers.
– NOTE: When deploying a load balancer from scratch, ensure that backend servers have Nginx installed. Additionally, confirm the availability and firewall permissions for the backend port.

I hope you found this blog post on deploying a load balancer from scratch helpful. Please let me know in the comment session if you have any questions.