/load-balancer-setup

name: load-balancer-setup
description: >
  Configure and deploy load balancers (HAProxy, AWS ELB/ALB/NLB) for
  distributing traffic, session management, and high availability.

Load Balancer Setup

Table of Contents

• [Overview](#overview)
• [When to Use](#when-to-use)
• [Quick Start](#quick-start)
• [Reference Guides](#reference-guides)
• [Best Practices](#best-practices)

Overview

Deploy and configure load balancers to distribute traffic across multiple backend servers, ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, and optimal resource utilization across your infrastructure.

When to Use

• Multi-server traffic distribution
• High availability and failover
• Session persistence and sticky sessions
• Health checking and auto-recovery
• SSL/TLS termination
• Cross-region load balancing
• API rate limiting at load balancer
• DDoS mitigation

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

# /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg
global
    log stdout local0
    log stdout local1 notice
    maxconn 4096
    daemon

    # Security
    tune.ssl.default-dh-param 2048
    ssl-default-bind-ciphers ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
    ssl-default-bind-options ssl-min-ver TLSv1.2

defaults
    log global
    mode http
    option httplog
    option denylogin
    option forwardfor
    option http-server-close

    # Timeouts
    timeout connect 5000
    timeout client 50000
    timeout server 50000

// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the `references/` directory:

| Guide | Contents | |---|---| | [HAProxy Configuration](references/haproxy-configuration.md) | HAProxy Configuration | | [AWS Application Load Balancer (CloudFormation)](references/aws-application-load-balancer-cloudformation.md) | AWS Application Load Balancer (CloudFormation) | | [Load Balancer Health Check Script](references/load-balancer-health-check-script.md) | Load Balancer Health Check Script | | [Load Balancer Monitoring](references/load-balancer-monitoring.md) | Load Balancer Monitoring |

Best Practices

✅ DO

• Implement health checks
• Use connection pooling
• Enable session persistence when needed
• Monitor load balancer metrics
• Implement rate limiting
• Use multiple availability zones
• Enable SSL/TLS termination
• Implement graceful connection draining

❌ DON'T

• Allow single point of failure
• Skip health check configuration
• Mix HTTP and HTTPS without redirect
• Ignore backend server limits
• Over-provision without monitoring
• Cache sensitive responses
• Use default security groups
• Neglect backup load balancers