A cheap web balancer: Nginx+haproxy+pacemaker

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I’m going to explain you how can you mount a too cheap and efficient web balancer, I’ve rolled out in productive and non-productive environments publishing all the web applications of multiples environments from continuos integration. I’ve used this solution in our productive environment after I had done benchmarks tests with “ab” and “siege” tool, but i will explain the tuning parameters and these benchmark tests in other post.

I’ve published all website for all environments dividing the main domain into a several subdomains
(p.e.: example.com) such as dev01.example.com, int01.example.com, test01.example.com, pre.example.com, etc…

Furthermore, in production environments we can use this segmentation splitting by countries (es.example.com, it.groupalia.com,…), platforms (m.example.com,…) or content type (static.example.com,…)

The list of the main goals:

  • Low cost: I’ve used open source technologies such as centOS, Nginx, Haproxy, Pacemaker, Corosync..
  • High availability: I’ve used virtualization technologies with HA feature enabled where virtual machines are running in different physicals machines, we have also high availability in service level through pacemaker+corosync daemons
  • SSL offloading, we centralize all httpS negotiation by nginx daemon, after that, all traffic rear nginx is plain http
  • Flexibility and control: haproxy bring us customize the balance algorithm to analyze load averages, free memory, connection status to databases, etc…
  • Security: we might use diferents virtual lans, all traffic between each one is filtered by firewall and we use httpS protocol in secure http transactions
  • We use this list technologies: Nginx,Haproxy, Pacemaker, Corosync.
    Look at the diagram of this solution:
    fisicalLB

    I explain this shortly, i just describe all components.
    Firstly, the browsers request content to CDN or our origins. Then, all requests come in to our origin filtered by firewall. One time traffic is filtered it goes to nginx, this split it by domain and do httpS negotiation. Then traffic is sended to haproxy, this balance all traffic to differents web servers. I’m going to secure all this infrastructure, we define 3 virtual lans, dmz, frontend and backend. All this traffic is filtered by firewall. Two virtual machines running CentOs will be deployed in DMZ, this machines are going to run Nginx and Haproxy in active-passive mode using pacemaker-corosync to manage this behavior. Web servers will be deployed in frontend vlan and databases and shared filesystems such as mysql, postgre, cassandra, mongo, cifs, hfs, nfs, etc.. will be deployed in backend vlan.

    I try to explain better using just one environment in this example, int01.example.com. I’ll describe up to down. This will be a little bit more technical explanation. Maybe, I hope this diagram help you to understand easier the architecture

    Diagrama Lògic

    Diagrama Lògic

    First of all, in DMZ vlan will be running nginx and haproxy with 2 virtual ip pools, one pool for each one. I’ve rolled out in vmware virtual infrastructure but you can do this using more cheapers solutions like Xenserver, KVM, etc… Tip: you must check each virtual machine is running in different physical machine, we need add this rule in our virtual infrastructure. The request come in nginx daemon running as a reverse proxy splitting traffic using multiples virtual hosts. Furthermore, nginx will do the httpS negotiation and will use plain http protocol to transfer traffic to haproxy adding HTTP header when transaction was httpS originally. Apache will recognize this http header and we’ll set the properly variable to mask it to application.
    Tip: We use a SSL certificate using wildcard in the Common-Name, it will be easier to manage this.
    Other Tip: set the properly parameters in this equation: max_clients=worker_processes * worker_connections / 4.

    All web traffic has splitted by nginx and transfered to haproxy. We will define a pool of “upstream” in haproxy parameter, one pool for each environment. Haproxy let us to select the best balance algorithm, i use Round Robin commonly. We also define ip ranges for every environment.
    Tip: we must define too large ip ranges, where we have many free ip, if we have performance troubles this bring us to deploy more front servers without restart haproxy daemon.
    In this example, haproxy will check the health status of any web server, haproxy will request a php script whose return will be the string “OK” only if node have a properly load average, all connections to each database is successfully and it has free memory. Note that haproxy also bring us to do sticky balancers analyzing HTTP headers like these: JSESSIONID in Java apps, PHPSESSID in PHP apps, ASPSESSIONID in ASP apps. Tip: You must to know each request need about 17KB and you will can define maxconn parameter.

    Finally, varnish-cache instance receives all requests in each server, the non-cacheable content and caducated content are requested to Apache in the same node, but i know these daemons need a special explanation, i will explain us in other post.

    Look at the configurations files below.
    Nginx configuration:

    ....
    upstream http-example-int01 {
        server lb2-vip.example.com:8080;
        keepalive 16;
    }
    server {
            listen lb1-vip.example.com:80;
        server_name int01.example.com ~^.*-int01\.example\.com$;
    
            location / {
                    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
                    proxy_set_header Host $host;
                    proxy_pass http://http-example-int01/;
                    proxy_redirect off;
            }
    }
    server {
            listen lb1-vip.example.com:443 ssl;
        server_name int01.example.com ~^.*-int01\.example\.com$;
    
            ssl on;
            ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/crt/concat.pem;
            ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/key/example.key;
    
            location / {
                    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
                    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;
                    proxy_set_header Host $host;
                    proxy_pass http://http-example-int01/;
                    proxy_redirect off;
            }
    }
    ....
    

    Haproxy configuration

    ...
    frontend example-int01 lb2-vip.grpprod.com:8080
        default_backend example-int01
    backend  example-int01
            option forwardfor
            option httpchk GET /healthcheck.php
            http-check expect string OK
            server  web01 x.y.z.w:80 check inter 2000 fall 3
            server  web02 x.y.z.w:80 check inter 2000 fall 3
            server  web03 x.y.z.w:80 check inter 2000 fall 3
            server  web04 x.y.z.w:80 check inter 2000 fall 3
            server  web05 x.y.z.w:80 check inter 2000 fall 3
    ...
    

    Apache configuration

    
     ServerName int01.example.com
        DocumentRoot "/srv/www/example/fa-front/public"
    
       <Directory "/srv/www/example/fa-front/public">
          Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks
          AllowOverride None
          Allow from All
          Order Allow,Deny
          RewriteEngine On
          RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} https
          RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTPS:on]
    
          RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
          RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
          RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
          RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
          RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]
    
       SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV int01
       DirectoryIndex index.php
    
       LogFormat "%v %{Host}i %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b %{User-agent}i" marc.int01
       CustomLog /var/log/httpd/cloud-example-front.log example
    
    

    Pacemaker configuration

    node balance01
    node balance02
    primitive nginx lsb:nginx \
            op monitor interval="1s" \
            meta target-role="Started
    primitive haproxy lsb:haproxy \
            op monitor interval="1s" \
            meta target-role="Started"
    primitive lb1-vip ocf:heartbeat:IPaddr2 \
            params ip="x.x.x.x" iflabel="nginx-vip" cidr_netmask="32" \
            op monitor interval="1s"
    primitive lb2-vip ocf:heartbeat:IPaddr2 \
            params ip="y.y.y.y" iflabel="haproxy-vip" cidr_netmask="32" \
            op monitor interval="1s"
    group haproxy_cluster lb2-vip haproxy \
            meta target-role="Started"
    group nginx_cluster lb1-vip  nginx \
            meta target-role="Started"
    property $id="cib-bootstrap-options" \
            dc-version="1.1.7-6.el6-148fccfd5985c5590cc601123c6c16e966b85d14" \
            cluster-infrastructure="openais" \
            expected-quorum-votes="2" \
            stonith-enabled="false" \
            last-lrm-refresh="1355137974" \
            no-quorum-policy="ignore"
    rsc_defaults $id="rsc-options" \
            resource-stickiness="100"
    

    WordPress running on RaspberryPi

    This is my first post in my fresh wordpress installation. Just now i’ve finished installing wordpress and i’m going to collect all steps. I’ve selected install Debian as operating system, then i use nginx, php-fpm and mysql daemons for running wordpress. This are all steps:

      • I had installed berryboot in SD card, and then i installed debian as a operative system. More info in this link
      • You must run “apt-get update” to update the repository source and i’ve installed my favourite editor.
      • I’ve installed all daemons needed:
    $sudo apt-get install nginx php5-fpm php5-cgi php5-cli php5-common php5-curl php5-gd php5-mcrypt php5-mysql mysql-server
    
    • Set php-fpm to work with nginx daemons, for that we will use a socket unix file to communicate to nginx daemons, and then we can configure nginx virtual host and set a specific global variable from php.

    File: /etc/nginx/sites-available/marc.cortinasval.cat

    server {
            listen   80; ## listen for ipv4; this line is default and implied
            root /usr/share/nginx/www;
            index index.php;
            server_name marc.cortinasval.cat;
            location / {
                    rewrite  ^/?$  /blog/  redirect;
                    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;
            }
            location /blog/ {
                    try_files $uri $uri/ /blog/index.php?$args;
            }
            location ~ \.php$ {
                    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
                    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
                    fastcgi_index index.php;
                    include fastcgi_params;
            }
            location = /favicon.ico {
                    log_not_found off;
                    access_log off;
            }
            location = /robots.txt {
                    allow all;
                    log_not_found off;
                    access_log off;
            }
            location ~ /\.ht {
                    deny all;
            }
            location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
                    expires max;
                    log_not_found off;
            }
    }
    

    We must check the php5-fpm is listening in the properly unix file

    $ grep listen /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf
    listen = /var/run/php5-fpm.sock
    

    Finally, we modify the cgi.fix_pathinfo to 0 in the file /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini

    $grep cgi.fix_pathinfo /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini
    cgi.fix_pathinfo=0
    
    • Firstly install the php files, then prepare the mysql database and finally set database credentials.

    Download wordpress installation files and unzip.

    $ cd /usr/share/nginx/www/
    $ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
    $ unzip latest.zip
    $ mv wordpress blog
    $ rm latest.zip
    

    We prepare mysql database:

    mysql> CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
    Query OK, 1 row affected (6.58 sec)
    mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO "wordpress"@"localhost"IDENTIFIED BY "wordpress";
    Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
    mysql> flush privileges;
    Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)
    mysql> exit;
    Bye
    

    Set database credentials in wordpress application

    cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
    vim wp-config.php
    

    File /usr/share/nginx/www/blog/wp-config.php

    /** The name of the database for WordPress */
    define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');
    /** MySQL database username */
    define('DB_USER', 'wordpress');
    /** MySQL database password */
    define('DB_PASSWORD', 'wordpress');
    /** MySQL hostname */
    define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
    

    Fix permissions in files and restart all daemons

    $sudo chown -R www-data.www-data /usr/share/nginx/www/
    $sudo service nginx restart 
    $sudo service php5-fpm restart
    

    Open any browser and you can do the first http request, then you can see the installation wizard is triggered.
    Set admin blog credentials and the wizard creates mysql data structure.

    I recommend you use url friendlies, it can increase the user experience, for example this url: https://marc.cortinasval.cat/index.php/2013/03/wordpress-en-raspberry-pi
    For that, we add this lines in nginx virtual host configuration.
    File: /etc/nginx/sites-available/marc.cortinasval.cat

    ...
            location /blog/ {
                    try_files $uri $uri/ /blog/index.php?$args;
            }
    ...
    
    • Finally, add and set the wordpress pluggins, i’ve listed the plugging i like it.

    SyntaxHighlighter Evolved
    WP to Twitter
    NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster
    Author Spotlight (Widget)
    ExtraWatch Live Stats and Visitor Counter FREE
    Google Analytics
    Google Analytics for WordPress
    Social Login for wordpress
    User Photo

    • Create categories and define menu tabs
    • Select, download and install any theme and add the menu

    I write this first post and my blog is ready to collect my technical experiences!!!