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At a high level, load balancing is typically accomplished by having a load balancer or set of load balancers present on a virtual server to a set of clients. This virtual server is backed by a pool of “real” servers that provide some type of resource to those clients. The role of the load balancer is to distribute client requests across the pool of servers including rerouting requests when a member of the pool fails. Clients are not aware which “real” server in the pool are servicing their requests, since they are only aware of the virtual server presented by the load balancer. By leveraging load balancers, client requests can be serviced in such a way as to mitigate against bottlenecks, due to resource contention on any given server or against failed requests due to failures on any given servers. The former use case is what is often considered scaling out while the latter is about creating a fault tolerant service. The canonical example is the use of load balancers in front of a pool of web servers, to serve out web pages to incoming clients via the internet.
Create a Load Balancer
Log in to the OpenStack dashboard.
On the Project tab, open the Network tab, and click the Load Balancers category.
Click the Create Load Balancer button.
Here we illustrate, through some screenshots, how to fill in the required fields, according to a typical LB configuration. In general, use the usual legend present in the tabs (represented by the question mark) to fill in the necessary information about the LB you want to create.
Load Balancer Details tab
