load-balancer-setup

SKILL.md

Load Balancer Setup

Table of Contents

Overview

When to Use

Quick Start

Reference Guides

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
HAProxy Configuration

AWS Application Load Balancer (CloudFormation)
AWS Application Load Balancer (CloudFormation)

Load Balancer Health Check Script
Load Balancer Health Check Script

Load Balancer Monitoring
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

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