Utilizing a load balancer with ECS is highly recommended. Highlights of some of the best practices when deploying with ECS include:
- Do not use a load balancer for CAS traffic since the Centera SDK has a built-in load balancer in software and cannot function without direct access to all nodes.
- Use the load balancer to terminate SSL connections to reduce the load on the ECS Nodes
- If SSL termination is required on ECS nodes itself, then use Layer 4 (tcp) to pass through the SSL traffic to ECS nodes for handling. The certificates would need to be installed on the ECS nodes and not on the load balancer.
- Use redundant load balancers to prevent a single point of failure.
- For NFS, use only the high availability functionality of the load balancer.
- Enable web monitoring for OpenResty to monitor traffic as described in this white paper.
- When deploying three or more ECS sites, employ a global load balancing mechanism such as the gslb.lua described in the Global Deployment example to distribute load across sites and to take advantage of the storage efficiency by ECS XOR. The gslb.lua script also optimizes the local object read hit rate in a global deployment.