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Monitor OCI Load Balancer backend operations for DevOps

Introduction

In this tutorial you will explore editing a backend’s weight, drain state, offline state, and backup state to see the resulting behavior. These are all useful features that can make your application deployment, maintenance, and recovery simple and seamless.

Objective

Monitor the OCI Load Balancer backend weight, drain state, offline state, backup state and understand how it affects traffic.

Prerequisites

Task 1: Monitor OCI Load Balancer default behavior

This example utilizes a weighted round robin distribution policy, with all weights being equal.

The behavior is as expected with the Load Balancer cycling through all backends sequentially.

Task 2: Monitor the OCI Load Balancer backend weight

A backend’s weight determines what proportion of incoming traffic it will receive, with a higher weight indicating a larger proportion. For example, a backend weighted “3” receives three times the number of new connections compared to a backend weighted “1”.

The weights work as expected.

Task 3: Explore the OCI Load Balancer backend drain state

Setting a server’s drain state to true means the Load Balancer will stop forwarding new TCP connections and new non-sticky HTTP requests to the backend server. This allows you to seamlessly take the server out of rotation and is useful for maintenance purposes.

Note: Drained backends do not receive any new TCP or non-sticky requests. Even so, the Load Balancing service considers a server marked “drain” available for existing persisted sessions. This means existing persisted sessions will still hit the drained backend, but new requests not part of an existing persisted session will not.

Task 4: Explore the OCI Load Balancer backend offline state

A backend’s offline status determines if any ingress traffic is forwarded to it, sticky or not. For example, when set to “True”, the Load Balancer forwards no ingress traffic to the backend.

Task 5: Explore the OCI Load Balancer backup state

Backup state allows you to define backend servers for disaster recovery scenarios. If a server’s backup status is set to “True”, the Load Balancer forwards ingress traffic to it only when all other backend servers not marked as backup are offline.

Note: Backend servers marked as backup are not compatible with Load Balancers using the IP Hash policy.

Acknowledgements

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