The External ELB Rancher Catalog Template


elb-catalog-2Rancher ships with two types of catalog items to deploy applications; Rancher certified catalog and community catalog, which enable the community to contribute to the reusable pre-built application stack templates. One of the recent interesting community catalog templates is the external load balancer for AWS Classic Elastic Load Balancer, which keeps an existing Load balancer updated with the EC2 instances on which Rancher services that have one or more exposed ports and specific label. This blog post will explain how to set up a Classic ELB and walk through the details of launching a catalog template for ELB from the community catalog to update the Classic ELB automatically.

Classic Elastic Load Balancer

Elastic load balancer is an Amazon Web Service that automatically distributes the incoming traffic to the across multiple Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancer offers two types of load balancers:

  • **Classic Load Balancers: **A simple load balancer that routes traffic to multiple backend EC2 instances, it routes traffic based on network or application level information, it offers many features including level 4 or level 7 load balancing which can either routes traffic based on just TCP protocol or using HTTP/HTTPS protocol and use level-7 features like X-Forwarded and sticky sessions.
  • **Application Load Balancers **This kind of load balancing option routes traffic based on its content and operates on the application level, it allows to define set of routing rules to route the traffic to multiple services or containers, it offers many more features like layer-7 support, HTTP/2, Websockets, security features, and much more.

ELB Catalog Template

This template is one of the community catalog template created by Jan B, The template creates a service that manage an existing classic load balancer with the EC2 instances that has Rancher services with exposed ports and a label io.rancher.service.external_lb.endpoint. elb\_service-schematic The catalog template uses some environment variables to modify the service:

  • ELBV1_AWS_ACCESS_KEY The AWS access key that is used by the external ELB service to communicate with the Elastic Load Balancer.
  • ELBV1_AWS_SECRET_KEY The AWS secret key that is used by the external ELB service to communicate with the Elastic Load Balancer.
  • **ELBV1_AWS_REGION **This optional option used to inform the service with the region where the ELB and the instances exist. Defaults to the region of the instance the service will be running on.
  • **ELBV1_AWS_VPCID **The VPC for the load balancers and EC2 instances in this Rancher environment. Defaults to the VPC of the instance the service will be running on.
  • **ELBV1_USE_PRIVATE_IP **This option is used to make the service update the ELB with the private IPs of the EC2 instances.

These options are used to set up the service, but before creating the service the Classic ELB should exist first.

Launching Classic ELB

Before creating the Classic load balancer, you should configure one or more listeners for the ELB, the listener has a front-end and back-end, both are configured with Port and Protocol. Elastic Load Balancing supports the following protocols:

  • HTTP
  • HTTPS (secure HTTP)
  • TCP
  • SSL (secure TCP)

To start a Classic ELB, open Amazon EC2 console, and then from the navigation bar select load balancers, then select Create Load Balancer: createlb After that you must provide the basic configuration for the load balancer, like the name, VPC, and listeners: basicconfig You should also configure the security group and health checks for the classic ELB, also you should skip adding the EC2 instances tab because the external service on Rancher will update the Classic ELB for us. config2

Creating Rancher Environment

The quick start guide provides detailed steps to set up Rancher platform on a Linux host with at least 1GB of RAM, however you should add EC2 hosts to the Rancher platform, you can achieve that by using the docker machine driver for AWS: env1 In this example, I will create two instances on AWS on the same region as the classic ELB that created earlier.

aws-instances

Creating ELB Catalog Service

From the catalog tab, search for “ELB”, and select the ELB Classic Load Balancer catalog item: elb-catalog The catalog should be configured with at least the AWS **Key ID **and Secret Key. Click Launch: launch-elb

Testing: Nginx Service

To test the external ELB, a service should be created with two conditions: 1. Exposed ports that should match the classic ELB listeners. 2. A label io.rancher.service.external_lb.endpoint That should be set to the name of the elastic load balancer. nginx-test You will notice updates to the logs for the external service:

10/24/2016 2:23:51 AM time="2016-10-23T23:23:51Z" level=info msg="Starting Rancher External LoadBalancer service"
10/24/2016 2:23:56 AM time="2016-10-23T23:23:56Z" level=info msg="Configured AWS ELB Classic provider in region eu-west-1 and VPC vpc-e177b284"
10/24/2016 2:23:56 AM time="2016-10-23T23:23:56Z" level=info msg="LB_TARGET_RANCHER_SUFFIX is not set, using default suffix 'rancher.internal'"
10/24/2016 2:23:56 AM time="2016-10-23T23:23:56Z" level=info msg="Healthcheck handler is listening on :1000"
10/24/2016 2:35:57 AM time="2016-10-23T23:35:57Z" level=info msg="LB configs to add: 1"
10/24/2016 2:35:57 AM time="2016-10-23T23:35:57Z" level=info msg="Adding LB config: {test-elb nginx_Test_c86a90c7-23df-419b-afb5-88ac2877a96e_rancher.internal 8888 []}"
10/24/2016 2:36:31 AM time="2016-10-23T23:36:31Z" level=info msg="LB configs to update: 1"
10/24/2016 2:36:31 AM time="2016-10-23T23:36:31Z" level=info msg="Updating LB config: {test-elb nginx_Test_c86a90c7-23df-419b-afb5-88ac2877a96e_rancher.internal 8888 [{52.212.53.65 8888}]}"
10/24/2016 2:37:16 AMt ime="2016-10-23T23:37:16Z" level=info msg="LB configs to update: 1"
10/24/2016 2:37:16 AM time="2016-10-23T23:37:16Z" level=info msg="Updating LB config: {test-elb nginx_Test_c86a90c7-23df-419b-afb5-88ac2877a96e_rancher.internal 8888 [{52.208.49.247 8888} {52.212.53.65 8888}]}"

Also you should see the two instances registered with the Classic ELB: nginx-instances To test the ELB, use the DNS name for the classic ELB: nginx-elb

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