Trying out the newly released Load Balancer service it seemed like a nice thing to add droplets as targets using tags. I created a lb tag on the relevant droplets and everything worked perfectly.
As doctl and the python library isn’t yet updated with support for the Load Balancer my first thought was that to remove a droplet from the pool I can just remove it’s tag. This doesn’t seem to work, removing the tag does not affect the membership in the Load Balancer pool it seems.
The question is, is this a bug or is it not meant to work? I’m fully aware that it’s a bit hackish, just curious.
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Yes, if you configure a Load Balancer to use a Droplet tag, removing the tag from a Droplet will remove it from the backend pool for the Load Balancer. Adding the tag to a new Droplet will add it to the pool. It’s not hackish. In fact, it’s intended to be a first class way of using a Load Balancer. We’ll likely be using this same pattern for a number of new features that are planned this year. Especially for people with quite a few Droplets, it can make managing them much simpler.
I was just able to successfully remove and re-add a Droplet from a Load Balancer by removing and re-adding a tag. Please open a ticket with the support team so they can take a closer look into what is going wrong in your case. You can do that directly from the control panel: https://cloud.digitalocean.com/support/tickets/new
It seems normal to me. As I can see, the load balancer only checks for new droplets and add its to the load balancer system, it’s not able to remove droplets from the system.
This may be a good thing for suggestion for the team.