Rohit Rahi

Load Balancing
Level 100 March 2018

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Objectives

After completing this lesson, you should be able to:

• Describe Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Load Balancing Service concepts
• Create and test a Public Load Balancer

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Load Balancing Primer
A load balancer sits between the clients and the backends performs tasks such as:
• Service Discovery: What backends are available in the system? How should the load
balancer talk to them? Load
• Health Check: What backends are currently healthy and available to accept requests? Balancer
• Load Balancing: What algorithm should be used to balance individual requests across the
healthy backends?

Load Balancer benefits

• Fault tolerance and HA: using health check + LB algorithms, a LB can effectively route
around a bad or overloaded backend
• Scale: LB maximizes throughput, minimizes response time, and avoids overload of any
single resource
• Naming abstraction: name resolution can be delegated to the LB; backends don’t need
public IP addresses

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OCI Load Balancing Service
• Load Balancer as-a-service, provides scale and HA
• Public and Private Load Balancer options
• Public Load Balancer service is regional in scope and provides High Availability across
two ADs
• Supported Protocols – TCP, HTTP/1.0, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, WebSocket
• Supports SSL Termination, End-to-End SSL, SSL Tunneling
• Supports advanced features such as session persistence and content based routing
• Key differentiators
– Private or Public Load Balancer (with Public IP address)
– Provisioned bandwidth – 100 Mbps, 400 Mbps, 8 Gbps
– Single load balancer for TCP (layer 4) and HTTP (layer 7) traffic

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Public Load Balancer

• Accepts traffic from the internet using a public IP address that serves as the entry point for incoming traffic
• Public Load Balancer is a regional service.
• If your region includes multiple availability domains, a public load balancer requires either a regional subnet
(recommended) or two availability domain-specific (AD-specific) subnets, each in a separate availability domain.
• Load Balancing service creates a primary load balancer and a standby load balancer, each in a different availability
domain
• Supports AD failover in the event of an AD outage in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure multi-AD region
• Floating Public IP is attached to the primary load balancer, and in the event of an AD outage Floating Public IP is
attached to the standby load balancer
• Service treats the two load balancers as equivalent and you cannot denote one as "primary”

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Public Load Balancer (Using Regional Subnets - recommended)

VCN AVAILABILITY DOMAIN-1 AVAILABILITY DOMAIN-2

Public IP address

Listener

Load Balancer Load Balancer Pair Load Balancer

(Active) (Failover)
Regional Subnet 1

Backend Set
Backend Servers Backend Servers
Regional Subnet 2

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Public Load Balancer (Using AD Specific Subnets)

VCN AVAILABILITY DOMAIN-1 AVAILABILITY DOMAIN-2

Public IP address

Listener

Load Balancer Load Balancer Pair Load Balancer

(Active) (Failover)
SUBNET 1 SUBNET 2

Backend Set
Backend Servers Backend Servers
SUBNET 3

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Private Load Balancer

• Assigned a private IP address from the subnet hosting the LB

• The load balancer can be regional or AD-specific, depending on the scope of the host subnet; highly-available within
an AD with AD specific subnets or Highly available with regional subnets
• The primary and standby load balancer each require a private IP address from that subnet
• The load balancer is accessible only from within the VCN that contains the associated subnet, or as further restricted
by your security list rules

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Private Load Balancer (Using Regional Subnets)
Local VCN
AVAILABILITY DOMAIN-1 traffic AVAILABILITY DOMAIN-2
VCN

Private IP address

Listener

Load Balancer Load Balancer Pair Load Balancer

(Active) (Failover)
Regional Subnet 1

Backend Set
Backend Servers Backend Servers
Regional Subnet 2

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Private Load Balancer (with AD Specific Subnets)

VCN AVAILABILITY DOMAIN-1 AVAILABILITY DOMAIN-2

Listener

(Failover) Local VCN

Load Balancer
(Active)
traffic
SUBNET 1

Backend Set
Backend Servers Backend Servers
Regional Subnet 2

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Concepts - Public Load Balancer
• Load Balancing Policy – tells the load
VCN AVAILABILITY DOMAIN-1 AVAILABILITY DOMAIN-2
balancer how to distribute incoming traffic to
the backend servers
• round-robin
Public IP address • IP hash
• least connection
Listener
• Backend Server – application server
Load Balancer Load Balancer Pair Load Balancer responsible for generating content in reply to
(Active) (Failover) the incoming TCP or HTTP traffic
Regional Subnet 1
• Health Checks – a test to confirm the
availability of backend servers; supports
• TCP-level
• HTTP-level health checks
Backend Set • Backend Set – logical entity defined by a list
Backend Servers Backend Servers of backend servers, a load balancing policy,
Regional Subnet 2 and a health check policy
• Listener – entity that checks for incoming
traffic on the load balancer's IP address

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Load Balancing Policies
• Round Robin: default policy, distributes incoming traffic sequentially to each server in a backend set.
After each server has received a connection, the load balancer repeats the list in the same order.
• IP Hash: uses an incoming request's source IP address as a hashing key to route non-sticky traffic to
the same backend server
• Least Connection: routes incoming non-sticky request traffic to the backend server with the fewest
active connections
• Load balancer policy decisions apply differently to TCP load balancer, cookie-based session persistent
HTTP requests (sticky requests), and non-sticky HTTP requests
– A TCP load balancer considers policy and weight criteria
– An HTTP load balancer w/ cookie-based session persistence forwards requests using cookie's
session info
– For non-sticky HTTP requests, the load balancer applies policy and weight criteria

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Health Check
• Health check is a test to confirm the availability of backend servers. Health Check is activated for
• Backends
• Backend set
• Overall Load Balancer
• A load balancer IP can have up to 16 listeners (port numbers). Each listener has a backend set that
can have 1 to N backend servers

Server 1

Backend set
Load
Listener Server 2
Balancer IP

Server 3
Listener

• Health API provides a 4-state health status (ok, warning, critical, unknown)
• Health status is updated every three minutes. No finer granularity is available

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Steps to create a Public Load Balancer

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1: Create VCN, a regional subnet and instances with web servers
Dest CIDR Route Target
0.0.0.0/0 IGW OCID

Availability Domain 1
Default Route Table

Default SL (+ port 80)

Internet
Gateway
Availability Domain 2

SUBNET A,
10.0.1.0/24

VCN, 10.0.0.0/16

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2: Create Load Balancer Route Table and Security List
Dest CIDR Route Target
LB SL (empty) LB Route Table 0.0.0.0/0 IGW OCID

Availability Domain 1

Internet
Gateway
Availability Domain 2

SUBNET A,
10.0.1.0/24

VCN, 10.0.0.0/16

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3: Create a regional Public Subnet for Load Balancer in your VCN
Dest CIDR Route Target
0.0.0.0/0 IGW OCID

Availability Domain 1

Internet
Gateway
Availability Domain 2

SUBNET B, SUBNET A,
10.0.2.0/24 10.0.1.0/24

VCN, 10.0.0.0/16

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4.1 Create the Public Load Balancer
Dest CIDR Route Target
0.0.0.0/0 IGW OCID

Availability Domain 1
LB
(Active)

Internet
Gateway
Availability Domain 2

SUBNET B, SUBNET A,
10.0.2.0/24 10.0.1.0/24

VCN, 10.0.0.0/16

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4.2 Add a backend set and add servers to backend set
• Add a Backend Set
– Name

Availability Domain 1
– Policy
– SSL
– Health Check
LB
(Active) • Add backend Servers to backend set
– Instance
– Port
Internet
Gateway – Weight
Availability Domain 2

Rules are NOT added to LB Security Lists

and backend server security lists
SUBNET B, SUBNET A,
automatically, the user has to manually open
10.0.2.0/24 10.0.1.0/24 them to allow traffic between them.

VCN, 10.0.0.0/16

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4.3 Add a Listener

• Add a Listener
– Name
Availability Domain 1 – Protocol, Port, SSL
– Backend Set
LB
(Active)

Listener
Internet
Availability Domain 2

Gateway

SUBNET B, SUBNET A,
10.0.2.0/24 10.0.1.0/24

VCN, 10.0.0.0/16

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 Type CIDR Protocol Source Dest
5: LB SL and Backend SL Port Port
Egress 10.0.1.0/24 TCP All 80

Availability Domain 1
LB
(Active) Type CIDR Protocol Source Dest
Port Port
Ingress 10.0.2.0/24 TCP All 80
Egress 0.0.0.0/0 All All
Internet
Availability Domain 2

Gateway

SUBNET B, SUBNET A,
10.0.2.0/24 10.0.1.0/24

VCN, 10.0.0.0/16

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6: Allow traffic to Listener
Type CIDR Protocol Source Dest
Port Port
Ingress 0.0.0.0/0 TCP All 80

Availability Domain 1 Egress 10.0.1.0/24 TCP All 80

LB
(Active)

Listener
Internet
Availability Domain 2

Gateway

SUBNET B, SUBNET A,
10.0.2.0/24 10.0.1.0/24

VCN, 10.0.0.0/16

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Pricing
OCI Load Balancer is priced as below

Metric Pay as You Go Monthly Flex

OCI - 100 Mbps Load Balancer Load Balancer Hour $0.0213 $0.0213

OCI - 400 Mbps Load Balancer Load Balancer Hour $0.0850 $0.0850
OCI - 8000 Mbps Load Balancer Load Balancer Hour $1.7 $1.7

There is no separate charge for any data handled at the Load Balancer tier

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0PUBLIC%20CLOUD%20GLOBAL%20PRICE%20LIST.PDF

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Summary

• OCI Load Balancer provides automated traffic distribution from one entry point to multiple servers in
VCN; Improves resource utilization, facilitates scaling, and helps ensure high availability
• OCI Load Balancer is a regional service and supports Public or Private Load Balancers
• Supports multiple Protocols – TCP, HTTP/1.0, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, WebSocket
• Supports SSL Offloading – SSL Termination, End-to-End SSL, SSL Tunneling
• Supports session persistence and content based routing
• Key differentiators
– Private or Public Load Balancer (with Public IP address)
– Provisioned bandwidth – 100 Mbps, 400 Mbps, 8 Gbps
– Single load balancer for TCP (layer 4) and HTTP (layer 7) traffic

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cloud.oracle.com/iaas

cloud.oracle.com/tryit

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