Learning OpenStack Networking - Third Edition

Fundamentals of load balancing

A load balancer is an object that represents a virtual IP and is associated with a Neutron port. A virtual IP is often exposed to the internet and mapped to a domain name to provide access to an internet-facing load balanced service. Virtual IPs can also be created for services limited to internal clients. Traffic to the virtual IP is distributed among pool members and provides scaling and resiliency to the application.

There are four major components to a load balancer in Neutron:

• Pool Member(s)
• Pool
• Health Monitor
• Listener(s)

A pool member is a Layer 4 object that represents the IP address and listening port of a service or application. For example, a pool member might be a web server with a configured IP ...