Use Ansible to setup HAproxy as a Load Balancer
What is HAProxy ?
HAProxy is a high-performance, open-source load balancer and reverse proxy for TCP and HTTP applications. Users can make use of HAProxy to improve the performance of websites and applications by distributing their workloads. Performance improvements include minimized response times and increased throughput. HAProxy is used in high traffic services such as Github and Twitter.
HAProxy Architecture :
Load balancers can be used to distribute workloads across computers, networks, disk drives or CPU’s. A reverse proxy accepts a request from a client, forwards it to a server that can fulfill it, and returns the server’s response to the client. A load balancer distributes incoming client requests among a group of servers, in each case returning the response from the selected server to the appropriate client.
What is Ansible ?
Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code.
Let’s start the configuration in Ansible …👇
Follow the below steps in Controller Node(CN) :
Step-1 : In CN, create a inventory file which consists of IP’s of load balancer and webservers.
Step-2 : Check the network connectivity to the webservers as well as load balancer using ping module.
ansible host_name -m ping
Step-3 : Create an ansible playbook (lb.yml) containing all configuration of webserver and HAProxy server(Load balancer).
Step-4 : To update HAProxy Configuration file automatically on each time , write the below code at the last in “haproxy.cfg.j2"
Step-5: Run the playbook using command :
ansible-playbook lb.yml (playbook_name)
Step-6: Check the Managed Node (load balancer) , configuration file is updated dynamically. (/etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg)
- The port no. is changed to 8081.
- It’s adding entry of every webserver present in the inventory file of CN.
Step-7: Check the working of load balancer on client browser, as the Client uses load balancer IP only, it doesn’t know from which webserver it is getting the content.
Task completed !✌️
