Key Features to Implement
-
Load Balancing Algorithm: Implement different algorithms like round-robin, least connections, or IP hash to distribute traffic among backend servers.
-
Health Checks: Regularly check the health of backend servers to ensure traffic is only sent to healthy instances. Implement both active (pinging servers) and passive (monitoring responses) health checks.
-
SSL Termination: Handle SSL/TLS termination at the load balancer to offload encryption/decryption tasks from the backend servers. Use libraries like OpenSSL to manage certificates and encryption.
-
Routing Rules: Implement host-based and path-based routing to direct traffic to the correct backend server based on the request's host or URL path. Use regular expressions or predefined rules to match requests.
-
Session Persistence: Implement sticky sessions to ensure a user's requests are consistently routed to the same backend server, which can be important for stateful applications.
-
Logging and Monitoring: Log requests and responses for debugging and monitoring purposes. Integrate with logging and monitoring tools to track the performance and health of your load balancer.
-
High Availability: Distribute traffic across multiple instances of your load balancer to ensure high availability and fault tolerance. Implement failover mechanisms to handle the failure of load balancer instances.