Appendix A. Example Configuration: Load Balancing Ceph Object Gateway Servers with HAProxy and Keepalived

This appendix provides an example showing the configuration of HAProxy and Keepalived with a Ceph cluster. The Ceph Object Gateway allows you to assign many instances of the object gateway to a single zone so that you can scale out as load increases. Since each object gateway instance has its own IP address, you can use HAProxy and keepalived to balance the load across Ceph Object Gateway servers.

In this configuration, HAproxy performs the load balancing across Ceph Object Gateway servers while Keepalived is used to manage the Virtual IP addresses of the Ceph Object Gateway servers and to monitor HAProxy.

Another use case for HAProxy and keepalived is to terminate HTTPS at the HAProxy server. Red Hat Ceph Storage (RHCS) 1.3.x uses Civetweb, and the implementation in RHCS 1.3.x does not support HTTPS. You can use an HAProxy server to terminate HTTPS at the HAProxy server and use HTTP between the HAProxy server and the Civetweb gateway instances. This example includes this configuration as part of the procedure.