load-balancer-setup

Load Balancer Setup

Table of Contents

• Overview
• When to Use
• Quick Start
• Reference Guides
• Best Practices

Overview

Deploy and configure load balancers to distribute traffic across multiple backend servers, ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, and optimal resource utilization across your infrastructure.

When to Use

• Multi-server traffic distribution
• High availability and failover
• Session persistence and sticky sessions
• Health checking and auto-recovery
• SSL/TLS termination
• Cross-region load balancing
• API rate limiting at load balancer
• DDoS mitigation

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

# /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg
global
    log stdout local0
    log stdout local1 notice
    maxconn 4096
    daemon

    # Security
    tune.ssl.default-dh-param 2048
    ssl-default-bind-ciphers ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
    ssl-default-bind-options ssl-min-ver TLSv1.2

defaults
    log global
    mode http
    option httplog
    option denylogin
    option forwardfor
    option http-server-close

    # Timeouts
    timeout connect 5000
    timeout client 50000
    timeout server 50000

// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Guide	Contents
HAProxy Configuration	HAProxy Configuration
AWS Application Load Balancer (CloudFormation)	AWS Application Load Balancer (CloudFormation)
Load Balancer Health Check Script	Load Balancer Health Check Script
Load Balancer Monitoring	Load Balancer Monitoring

Best Practices

✅ DO

• Implement health checks
• Use connection pooling
• Enable session persistence when needed
• Monitor load balancer metrics
• Implement rate limiting
• Use multiple availability zones
• Enable SSL/TLS termination
• Implement graceful connection draining

❌ DON'T

• Allow single point of failure
• Skip health check configuration
• Mix HTTP and HTTPS without redirect
• Ignore backend server limits
• Over-provision without monitoring
• Cache sensitive responses
• Use default security groups
• Neglect backup load balancers