Re: Session stickiness over HTTP and HTTPS

On 07.12.09 23:19, Anthony Urso wrote:
> Hi:
>
> I am looking for advice on the best way to load-balance HTTP and HTTPS
> traffic such that once a session is established with either protocol,
> haproxy continues to send new requests from that session to the same
> web server.
>
> Is this a common use case?

This indeed pretty common (although, I tend to avoid this for the sake of simplicity using cookie-based sessions et al.)

However, as HTTP is a stateless protocol by definition, which does not inherently have the concept of a session, you have to decide for yourself (or your app) what exactly a session makes.

Using this info you can then tell Haproxy how to match a specific stateless request from a client and send it to the correct server which then holds its session data.

For some well-documented examples see the architecture guide. [1] Additionally, it is always a good idea to put the configuration manual [2] under your pillow at night ;)

> I see that section 3.1 in the configuration guide discusses using
> stunnel for this, but it's not clear whether haproxy will choose the
> sticky server based on stunnel's X-Forwarded-For header or it will
> choose the destination by the stunnel machine's address?

As stated above, this is up to you. In this case I think, it makes only sense to have it use the X-Forwarded-For header of stunnel. You can configure both.

--Holger

[1] http://haproxy.1wt.eu/download/1.3/doc/architecture.txt [2] http://haproxy.1wt.eu/download/1.3/doc/configuration.txt Received on 2009/12/08 00:56