Utilizing a load balancer with ECS is highly recommended. Highlights of some 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.
- Load balancer is best for data traffic.
- 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 single point of failure.
- For NFS, use only the high available functionality of the load balancer.
- Enable web monitoring for HAProxy to monitor traffic.
- When deploying 3 or more ECS sites, employ a global load balancing mechanism to distribute load across sites to take advantage of ECS XOR storage efficiency. It is also important to optimize the local object read hit rate in a global deployment.