I have a Windows IIS web farm on EC2 that I'm looking at my load balancing options for? Any suggestions? Right now I'm using a Linux instance running HAproxy.
5 Answers
Since you're looking for a server-based, rather than appliance solution, and I'm not aware of any products that run on Windows, I guess your best bet is to use a Linux-based solution. You have a number of choices:
HAProxy
Apache and mod_proxy
LVS
...probably more I don't know about.
Amazon just released a load balancing product that might do what you want. Check out aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/ for info.
You might want to have a look at Apache Synapse. It is aimed more at web services rather than pure http proxying, but does have some nice features allowing not only load balancing, but the ability to spin up additional servers on EC2 in response to application load.
Check out WeoCEO - it's a load balancing appliance that spins up as an EC2 instance. It works roughly the same as conventional hardware load balancing solutions like F5's.
We've been using pound. We are not completely happy with it however. The main concern is lack of configurability for special cases and not many others seem to use it. We don't actually use it for load balancing so much as service redirection so it's overkill in our case right now.
It is packaged for Ubuntu though, which makes installation and maintenance a breeze.