OpenStack and LBaaS

The OpenStack Neutron project is currently on version 2 of its LBaaS implementation.

LBaaS v2 seeks to address some of the limitations in v1, including a lack of scalability
and a lack of flexibility in how LBaaS could be configured. Since LBaaS v1 has been
deprecated in the Liberty release and in RPC v12.2, we’ll focus on v2.

OpenStack LBaaS leverages agents that control the HAProxy configuration and manage
the HAProxy daemon. HAProxy is a popular open source software that provides
TCP/HTTP load balancing and is the default load balancing engine for OpenStack Load
balancers. These HAProxy based load balancers have network access to clients and to
the member servers which answer client requests by requesting and receiving Neutron
networks ports and IP Addresses.

A significant change in LBaaS v2 is the addition of Listeners. A Listener is mapped to

and listens for requests made to a given network port. In LBaaS v1, a load balancer
could only have one listener per load balancer. With v2, uses can create multiple
Listeners for a load balancer, allowing requests to come in via multiple network ports.

Another significant change is the additional option of using an alternate

implementation of LBaaS called Octavia. Octavia is fully integrated with Neutron and
LBaaS v2 and provides additional capabilities such as allowing users to deploy
redundant load balancer instanc