Proposing Elastic Load Balancing as a Service for OpenStack
We at Mirantis have had a number of clients request functionality that can control various load balancer devices (software and hardware) via an OpenStack API and the Horizon console.
So, in collaboration with Cisco's OpenStack team and a number of other community members, we’ve started socializing a set of blueprints for an elastic load balancer API service - LBaaS.
The current vision is to let cloud tenants request and provision virtual load balancers on demand, and to allow cloud administrators to manage a pool of available LB devices. A unified interface provides access to different kinds of load balancers, both software and hardware. With LBaaS, the API for tenants is abstracted away from the actual API of underlying hardware or software load balancers, in consistent fashion. Currently we have "drivers" for Cisco ACE and haproxy, but we aim to support more, and the project is of course open-source.
You can read a discussion of our proposal on the OpenStack mailing list. You can also check out:
We look forward to your input and collaboration.
