Haproxy Infrastructure SOP

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haproxy - SOP

Contact Information

Owner: Fedora Infrastructure Team


Location: Phoenix, Tummy, Telia

Servers: proxy1, proxy2, proxy3

Purpose: Provides load balancing from the proxy layer to our application layer.


haproxy is an application that does load balancing at the tcp layer or at the http layer. It can do generic tcp balancing but it does specialize in http balancing. Our proxy servers are still running apache and that is what our users connect to. But instead of using mod_proxy_balancer and ProxyPass balancer://, we do a ProxyPass to http://localhost:10001/ or http://localhost:10002/. haproxy must be told to listen to an individual port for each farm. All haproxy farms are listed in /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg.

How it works

haproxy is a load balancer if you're familiar, this section won't be that interesting. haproxy in its normal usage acts just like a web server. It listens on a port for requests. Unlike most webservers though it then sends that request to one of our back end application servers and sends the response back. This is refered to as reverse proxying. We typically configure haproxy to send check to a specific url and look for the response code. If this url isn't sent, it just does basic checks to /. In most of our configurations we're using round robin balancing. IE, request 1 goes to app1, request2 goes to app2, request 3 goes to app3 request 4 goest to app1, and the whole process repeats.


Configuration example

The below example is how our fedoraproject wiki could be configured. Each application should have its own farm. Even though it may have an identical configuration to another farm, this allows easy addition and subtraction of specific nodes when we need them.

listen  fpo-wiki
   balance roundrobin
   server  app1 app1.fedora.phx.redhat.com:80 check inter 2s rise 2 fall 5
   server  app2 app2.fedora.phx.redhat.com:80 check inter 2s rise 2 fall 5
   server  app4 app4.fedora.phx.redhat.com:80 backup check inter 2s rise 2 fall 5
   option  httpchk GET /wiki/Infrastructure

The first line "listen ...." Says to create a farm called 'fpo-wiki'. Listening on all IP's on port 10001. fpo-wiki can be arbitrary but make it something obvious. Aside from that the important bit is :10001. Always make sure that when creating a new farm, its listening on a unique port. In Fedora's case we're starting at 10001, and moving up by one. Just check the config file for the lowest open port above 10001.

The next line "balance roundrobin" says to use round robin balancing.

The server lines each add a new node to the balancer farm. In this case the wiki is being served from app1, app2 and app4. If the wiki is available at http://app1.fedora.phx.redhat.com/wiki/ Then this config would be used in conjunction with "RewriteRule ^/wiki/(.*) http://localhost:10001/wiki/$1 [P,L]".

  • 'server' means we're adding a new node to the farm
  • 'app1' is the worker name, it is analagous to fpo-wiki but should match shorthostname of the node to make it easy to follow.
  • 'app1.fedora.phx.redhat.com:80' is the hostname and port to be contacted.
  • 'check' means to check via bottom line "option httpchk GET /wiki/Infrastructure" which will use /wiki/Infrastructure to verify the wiki is working. If that URL fails, that entire node will be taken out of the farm mix.
  • 'inter 2s' means to check every 2 seconds. 2s is the same as 2000 in this case.
  • 'rise 2' means to not put this node back in the mix until it has had two successful connections in a row. haproxy will continue to check every 2 seconds whether a node is up or down
  • 'fall 5' means to take a node out of the farm after 5 failures.
  • 'backup' You'll notice that app4 has a 'backup' option. We don't actually use this for the wiki but do for other farms. It basically means to continue checking and treat this node like any other node but don't send it any production traffic unless the other two nodes are down.
All of these options can be tweaked so keep that in mind when changing or building a new farm. There are other configuration options in this file that are global. Please see the haproxy documentation for more info -


In order to view the stats for a farm please see the stats page. Each proxy server has its own stats page since each one is running its own haproxy server. To view the stats point your browser to https://admin.fedoraproject.org/haproxy/shorthostname/ so proxy1 is at https://admin.fedoraproject.org/haproxy/proxy1/ The trailing / is important.

Advanced Usage

haproxy has some more advanced usage that we've not needed to worry about yet but is worth mentioning. For example, one could send users to just one app server based on session id. If user A happened to hit app1 first and user B happened to hit app4 first. All subsiquent requests for user A would go to app1 and user B would go to app4. This is handy for applications that cannot normally be balanced because of shared storage needs or other locking issues. This won't solve all problems though and can have negative affects for example when app1 goes down user A would either lose their session, or be unable to work until app1 comes back up. Please do some great testing before looking in to this option.