Manage Rules

In this guide

What is a load balancer rule?

Rules define which ports should be available on this load balancer and how they will be monitored. They can be defined for HTTP, HTTPS and TCP traffic.

For example: You might wish to redirect port 80 traffic at the load balancers to your virtual machines running web services on port 5000.

Create a new rule

Initial Steps

  1. Click Networking -> Load balancers from the left sidebar.
  2. Find and select the name of the load balancer you wish to make changes to.
  3. If this is the first rule for this load balancer click the Add first rule button in the Rules table. Otherwise, click the Add new rule link in the header of the table.
  4. Choose a protocol for the rule (i.e. HTTPS)
  5. Enter the port to listen out on, and the port to redirect traffic to at the virtual machine level.

Health Check Configuration

If you would like Katapult to monitor this rule (Health Check) you can configure rules for the monitoring during the creation of the rule. An explanation of the fields is below.

Enabled?

Yes / No as to whether you wish to enable Health Checks on this rule.

Protocol

This is the protocol you would like the health check to use. The default is HTTP, but TCP can also be used.

Path

(HTTP protocol only) Allows you to specify the path that should be requested as part of the health check.

Valid HTTP Status

(HTTP protocol only) Choose what type of returned HTTP status is considered a healthy response. You can choose from 2xx, 3xx or even 4xx HTTP status codes.

Interval

How many seconds apart should a health check be carried out. The default is 20.

Healthy Quantity

The number of consecutive checks which must succeed before a virtual machine is considered to be healthy.

Unhealthy Quantity

The number of consecutive checks which must fail before a virtual machine is considered to be unhealthy.

Timeout

The number seconds to wait for a check to succeed before considering it a failure.

Advanced Options

Algorithm

The algorithm you would this load balancer to use when distributing traffic. You can choose from:

  • Round robin (where each request is sent to each virtual machine in turn)
  • Least connections (where requests are sent to the virtual machine handling the least connections at the time)
  • Sticky (where a single user remains with a given virtual machine until the completion of their session)

Encrypt backend traffic

Established whether the connection between the load balancer and the assigned virtual machine should be encrypted or not.

Use Proxy Protocol

Proxy Protocol sends requests onto virtual machines as if they originated from the original end-user as opposed to from the load balancer. Enabling this feature will assist in situations where the end application calculates user from their IP address, as one example.

Creating the rule

Once you are happy you have configured the rule correctly, click the green Create Rule button.

Edit a rule

  1. Click Networking -> Load balancers from the left sidebar.
  2. Find and select the name of the load balancer you wish to make changes to.
  3. Click on the Edit button next to rule you wish to edit within the Rules table.
  4. Make your required changes and click the Save button.

For guidance as to what each of the fields within the edit page mean, please refer to the 'Create a rule' section.

Delete a rule

  1. Click Networking -> Load balancers from the left sidebar.
  2. Find and select the name of the load balancer you wish to make changes to.
  3. Click on the Edit button next to rule you wish to edit within the Rules table.
  4. Scroll down towards the bottom of the page.
  5. Click the Delete Rule link.
  6. Confirm the prompt.

The rule will now be removed.