load balancer the load balancers

July 29, 2013 9.3k views
brad
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brad
I am trying to figure out how to use your service to host a load balancer server with web servers set up in the back end. The front end load balancers would be nginx solely for proxying, caching and load balancing the traffic to the two back-end web servers. Of course I need to make sure that neither server fails so I am creating a pair of them to load balance each other. My question is how to I set up a pair of nginx (or any other tech, ex. haproxy) in a cluster. Other environments provide a VIP that I would use for external access. I would then set up my DNS to point to this VIP. If one of the servers goes down, no big deal.
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4 Answers
kamaln7 MOD July 29, 2013
Hi Brad,

We have an article on setting up Nginx load balancing: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-set-up-nginx-load-balancing

And a couple of articles on scaling:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-scale-your-infrastructure-with-digitalocean
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-scale-web-applications-on-ubuntu-12-10

Let me know if these resources help.
How To Set Up Nginx Load Balancing
by Etel Sverdlov
This article covers how to set up a simple load balancer on a DigitalOcean droplet with nginx. The tutorial covers setting up a round robin loadbalancer that can then direct site visitors to one of a set of IPs
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brad July 30, 2013
thanks for the response!
I have gone through these articles and I see that there still exists the problem that I am trying to solve; eliminate any single point of failure. If my load balancer fails my entire site will be down until that droplet can start back up again.
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jbraunhut July 30, 2013
Hi Brad,

Not sure if Digital Ocean can support this, but here's a link to a vanilla way of pairing nginx instances using Linux heartbeat:

http://people.adams.edu/~cdmiller/posts/nginx-heartbeat-ha/

Enjoy!
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brad July 31, 2013
Thanks Jon! I will be keeping an eye on DO in the future.
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