Hi Pawel,
For small deployments, the 1GB RAM, 1vCPU, 2GB disk (3GB with centos, etc) should work fine for you. You might even be able to drop the RAM lower if you will not be doing TLS. For example, my devstack amphora instance is allocated 1GB RAM, but is only using less than half that. (just because the flavor says 1GB it doesn't mean it uses all of that all of the time) Kernel page de-duplication will also help with actual consumption as the amphora images are mostly the same.
If you are doing really large numbers of connections, and you are logging the tenant traffic flows locally, you might want to increase the available disk. Normal workloads will be fine with a smaller disk as the amphora do include log rotation. If you do not need the flow logs, there is a configuration setting to disable them.
The main tuning you might want to do is setting the maximum amount of RAM it can consume. If you have a very large number of concurrent connections or are using TLS offloading, you might want to consider increasing the amount of RAM the amphora can consume. The HAProxy documentation states that it normally(non-TLS offload) uses around 32kB of RAM per established connection. You might start with that and see how that aligns to your application/use case.
In testing I have done, adding additional vCPUs has very little impact on the performance(a small bump with the second CPU as the NIC interrupts can be split from the HAProxy processes). You can get pretty high throughput with a single vCPU. We expect once HAProxy 2.0 stabilizes and is available (the distros are not yet shipping it), we will look at enabling the threading support to vertically scale the amphora by adding vCPUs. Versions prior to 2.0 did not have good threading and the multi-process model breaks a bunch of features. If you really need more CPU now, you can always build a custom image with 2.0.x in it and use the "custom HAProxy template" configuration setting to add the threading settings.
Now with Octavia flavors, you can define flavors that select different nova flavors for the amphora at load balancer creation. For example, you can have a "bronze", "silver", "gold", each with different RAM allocations.
We would also love to hear what you find with your deployment and applications.
Michael
On Wed, Sep 4, 2019 at 2:49 AM Pawel Konczalski pawel.konczalski@everyware.ch wrote:
Hello everyone / Octavia Team,
what is your experience / recommendation for a Octavia flavor with is used to deploy Amphora VM for small / mid size setups? (RAM / Cores / HDD)
BR
Pawel