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Hi Neutron LBaaS folks,


I have been getting up to speed on the Neutron LBaaS implementation and
have been wondering how to make it fit our needs in HP public cloud as well
as as an enterprise-grade load balancer service for HP Openstack
implementations. We are currently using Libra as our LBaaS implementation
and are interested in moving to the Neutron LBaaS service in the future.


I have been looking at the LBaaS requirements posted by Jorge at:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Neutron/LBaaS/requirements


When we started looking at existing packages for our LBaaS service we had a
focus on requirements needed to create a managed service where the user
would just interact with the service APIs and not have to deal with
resiliency, HA, monitoring, and reporting functions themselves. Andrew
Hutchings became the HP Tech Lead for the open source Libra project. For
historical reasons around why we decided to contribute to Libra see:

http://openstack.10931.n7.nabble.com/Neutron-Relationship-between-Neutron-LBaaS-and-Libra-td29562.html


We would like to discuss adding the concept of "managed services" to the
Neutron LBaaS either directly or via a Neutron LBaaS plug-in to Libra/HA
proxy. The latter could be a second approach for some of the software
load-balancers e.g. HA proxy since I am not sure that it makes sense to
deploy Libra within Devstack on a single VM.


Currently users would have to deal with HA, resiliency, monitoring and
managing their load-balancers themselves.  As a service provider we are
taking a more managed service approach allowing our customers to consider
the LB as a black box and the service manages the resiliency, HA,
monitoring, etc. for them.


We like where Neutron LBaaS is going with regards to L7 policies and SSL
termination support which Libra is not currently supporting and want to
take advantage of the best in each project.

We have a draft on how we could make Neutron LBaaS take advantage of Libra
in the back-end.

The details are available at:
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Neutron/LBaaS/LBaaS%2Band%2BLibra%2Bintegration%2BDraft


While this would allow us to fill a gap short term we would like to discuss
the longer term strategy since we believe that everybody would benefit from
having such "managed services" artifacts built directly into Neutron LBaaS.


There are blueprints on high-availability for the HA proxy software
load-balancer and we would like to suggest implementations that fit our
needs as services providers.


One example where the managed service approach for the HA proxy load
balancer is different from the current Neutron LBaaS roadmap is around HA
and resiliency. The 2 LB HA setup proposed (
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/neutron/+spec/lbaas-ha-haproxy) isn't
appropriate for service providers in that users would have to pay for the
extra load-balancer even though it is not being actively used.  An
alternative approach is to implement resiliency using a pool of stand-by
load-and preconfigured load balancers own by e.g. LBaaS tenant and assign
load-balancers from the pool to tenants environments. We currently are
using this approach in the public cloud with Libra and it takes
approximately 80 seconds for the service to decide that a load-balancer has
failed, swap the floating ip and update the db, etc. and have a new LB
running.


Regards Susanne


--------------

Susanne Balle

HP Cloud
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