Using HAProxy for load balancing FileCloud Servers

January 16, 2014

Although starting your own personal cloud server using FileCloud is pretty easy, it is generally seen that scaling your server to accommodate a higher demand is a far bigger concern. True that using a larger and more powerful server can help in this, there comes a time when the traffic is so large that a […]

Although starting your own personal cloud server using FileCloud is pretty easy, it is generally seen that scaling your server to accommodate a higher demand is a far bigger concern. True that using a larger and more powerful server can help in this, there comes a time when the traffic is so large that a single dedicated server will not be able to handle loads. In such cases, you would need to distribute traffic in a smart way. This idea is known as load balancing.

We can implement load balancing at two levels. Firstly, we can implement load balancing for the server which runs FileCloud and secondly, we can perform the task for the database, which in this case is MongoDB. The two cases are illustrated below.

To demonstrate the same, we would need three virtual machines- one running FileCloud normally with the database in the same system (System A), one running FileCloud but connects to the database at A for storage (System B) and a final virtual machine which runs HAProxy as a load balancer (System C), which reroutes your request to either of systems A or B. In this case, it is important to understand that no matter which system (A or B) you choose, the response that you are going to get is going to be the same.

Setting Up Systems A and B:

The first step here is to install FileCloud normally on System A. You can follow the guide here to start installing your system.

Secondly, you need to install FileCloud the same way on System B but point the database to the one on System A. The admin documentation instructs you on which file to edit and what to change.

Installing and configuring HAProxy:

The third part is usually the toughest, since you need to set up a load balancer. We use HAProxy in our case. We use a Ubuntu server to demonstrate the use of HAProxy. Install HAProxy by running

       sudo apt-get install HAProxy

To enable it, you need to edit /etc/default/haproxy and set the value of ENABLED to 1. Next, you need to edit the configuration file which is located at /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg. Although the documentation of HAProxy is self explanatory, it doesn’t provide you with a sample working config file, which might be an issue.

global

   maxconn 2000

   user haproxy

   group haproxy

 

defaults

   log     global

   mode    http

   option  httplog

   option  dontlognull

   retries 3

   option redispatch

   timeout connect  5000

   timeout client  50000

   timeout server  50000

listen appname 0.0.0.0:80

   mode http

   stats enable

   stats uri /haproxy?stats

   stats realm Strictly\ Private

   stats auth A_Username:<username>

   stats auth Another_User:<password>

   balance roundrobin

   option httpclose

   option forwardfor

   server serverA <server_ip>:80 check

   server serverB <server_ip>:80 check

Here is a brief explanation of the options.

Once you have saved the configuration file, start HAProxy by running service haproxy start.

FileCloud uses MongoDB for its database storage and MongoDB supports replication and sharding by default. Here is a great tutorial on scaling MongoDB.

We hope that this post helped you in understanding the basic implementation of load balancing for FileCloud. If you have any issues, feel free to leave in the comments below.

By Team FileCloud