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Traffic Distributor Guide
Cloud Platform – A common problem you can have while working on your cloud development projects is the necessity to maintain multiple environments.
When getting more and more clients or users, the capacity to serve all of the clients will become critical such as handling different app versions.
You can often face the problem of proper traffic distribution between such project copies, including a number of aspects like setting the proper method for request routing, server loading rates, etc.
UKHost4u Traffic Distributor
Solving all of these issues can become a challenge even for experienced developers.
To ease these problems’ resolution, UKHost4u offers a completely free and easy-to-use solution, based on the automatically configured load balancer.
It is delivered as a special Traffic Distributor add-on, which is available for quick one-click installation through UKHost4u app marketplace and provides smart traffic routing based on your requirements.
With this solution you are able to set intelligent workloads balancing between pairs of hosts and benefit from the following features and opportunities it provides:
- High availability and advanced failover: where the load is shared among two copies of your application, which could be located on different hardware to achieve better failure protection.
- Blue-Green application deploy (zero downtime): that will redirect all incoming requests to a single backend for the time another one is undergoing maintenance.
- Ongoing A/B testing: route the incoming traffic between two different application versions and compare their performance and UX rates to choose the best one for production.
- Intuitive UI: configuration form allows you to set all the main parameters of your traffic distributor either during its creation or consequent adjustment. You can choose among three different routing methods:
- Round Robin.
- Sticky Sessions.
- Failover.
- Health check: both backends are automatically checked for a normal response such as the returning 200 status code according to the configurable parameters:
- Frequency.
- Timeout.
- Etc.
- Flexibility & extensibility: You can also apply any required additional tuning like setting up caching, TCP mapping, SNI, etc. via NGINX configuration files manually. The best part? No limitations are applied.
Generally, compared to running a sole server, Traffic Distributor allows you to speed up the processing of requests, decrease users’ response delay, and, generally, handle more simultaneous threads without failures.
Routing Methods
With the UKHost4u Traffic Distributor solution, you are able to choose among three different routing methods in order to get the one, which will suit your needs the best.
Each of the available options has its own specifics and usage purposes, that should be considered during the selection:
1. Round Robin
The most used and straightforward routing method. It allows you to distribute traffic among your environments equally, pointing each request to them in rotation thanks to the set backend priorities.
PLEASE NOTE: With this option, as the requested by users data is going to be loaded from both of them, you should provide identical content on both of your backends.
2. Sticky Sessions
According to the set servers’ weights, this routing type is based on “sticking” each user to a specific backend, which will process all their requests until the corresponding user session, created on the first app visit, expires.
3. Failover
This kind of traffic routing allows you to set the backup copy of your primary server and keep it on standby (or “in reserve”) until the first one’s failure.
And if some issue occurs with the main backend, all of the requests will be automatically redirected to the working server, so that your users most likely won’t even notice any interruption in the application work.
Traffic Distributor Implementation
To set up your own Traffic Distributor (TD), open the marketplace via the cloud dashboard:
Locate the Traffic Distributor solution within the “Dev & Admin Tools” tab and click install.
Then click “OK”.
- You will be invited to fill in your main parameters:
- Select the hosts to route the requests between.
- Select routing type, state traffic ratio, etc.
- Start the installation by clicking on the “Install” button.
- After being created, Traffic Distributor will represent a separate environment with an NGINX load balancer server (with a predefined amount of nodes) and a special add-on installed on top of it.
Herewith, during installation, you also define an entry point for it. Set the requests for being processed either through the Shared Load Balancer or Public IP address(es), attached to each of the balancer nodes.
PLEASE NOTE: Traffic Distributor works by means of commonly used HTTP and HTTPS protocols, but is also suitable for any other one, which works over them (including WebSockets).
Herewith, the load balancing itself is performed only during HTTP handshake operation, after which the persistent WebSockets connection to the backend will be established.
In such a way, you can get an extremely flexible UKhost4u Traffic Distributor tool, intended to help you in accomplishing various goals:
- Starting with a simple routing to achieve even server loading.
- Applying blue-green deployment to install app updates with zero downtime.
- Performing ongoing A/B testing.
- Applying for advanced failover protection etc.
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