Mongrel, non-Rails serving and a hardware load balancer

On Feb 26, 9:57 am, Raul <roll...gmail.com> wrote:

> OK making tons of progress learning here and getting
pretty close to deployment and I need a some more guidance. 
I've been testing with Nginx as the proxy to my mongrel
cluster but I also have a hardware load balancer.  Now it
seems to me that just using the load balancer to balance
among all the mongrels in several clusters across several
machines would be simple and work great.  But if I want
something other than Mongrel to serve up html, etc. or if I
want to add in PHP support then I probably need to stick
with something like Nginx or Apache as the proxy load
balancer, correct?  

Several issues here:

1) Can you bypass nginx with a hardware load balancer?
Answer: yes

2) Is it as efficient? Not quite: nginx is *very* efficient
at serving
static images.

3) How does this interact with non-Rails applications:
Answer:
depends!
    a) If you can balance on level-7 information (URL for
instance)
then it's not a deal breaker
    b) If you can put the different technologies at
different IP
addresses, then it's not a deal breaker
    c) If you want and/or need SSL and/or gzip compression,
if your
load balancer provides these functions, then it's not a deal
breaker.

#3 could go on and on.

> Just to give a bit bigger picture, I have a couple of
machines on which I'm going to be running a couple of VMs on
with Xen so I'll have at least 4 VMs and lots of mongrels
too.  Plus a development server with subversion and
Capistrano to manage all the deployment.

Congrats on your technology stack. You're on a great path,
IMHO. 

--
-- Tom Mornini


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Thanks for the response!  OK I can see where you're headed. 
I think I might 
explore using the hardware load balancer across all the VM's
and set up 
identical Nginx/Mongrels across them all.  If I need to add
PHP support I'll 
add them across all of them as well.  Basically just treat
them all like a 
server farm I guess.  So I don't think it'll be too bad
having double load 
balancing, one at the hardware level and the next at the
software level.

Thanks for the reply, any other views is greatly
appreciated!

Raul


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "tmorniniengineyard.com" <tmorninigmail.com>
To: "Deploying Rails"
<rubyonrails-deploymentgooglegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2007 3:16 PM
Subject: [Rails-deploy] Re: Mongrel, non-Rails serving and a
hardware load 
balancer


>
> On Feb 26, 9:57 am, Raul <roll...gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> OK making tons of progress learning here and
getting pretty close to 
>> deployment and I need a some more guidance.  I've
been testing with Nginx 
>> as the proxy to my mongrel cluster but I also have
a hardware load 
>> balancer.  Now it seems to me that just using the
load balancer to 
>> balance among all the mongrels in several clusters
across several 
>> machines would be simple and work great.  But if I
want something other 
>> than Mongrel to serve up html, etc. or if I want to
add in PHP support 
>> then I probably need to stick with something like
Nginx or Apache as the 
>> proxy load balancer, correct?
>
> Several issues here:
>
> 1) Can you bypass nginx with a hardware load balancer?
Answer: yes
>
> 2) Is it as efficient? Not quite: nginx is *very*
efficient at serving
> static images.
>
> 3) How does this interact with non-Rails applications:
Answer:
> depends!
>    a) If you can balance on level-7 information (URL
for instance)
> then it's not a deal breaker
>    b) If you can put the different technologies at
different IP
> addresses, then it's not a deal breaker
>    c) If you want and/or need SSL and/or gzip
compression, if your
> load balancer provides these functions, then it's not a
deal breaker.
>
> #3 could go on and on.
>
>> Just to give a bit bigger picture, I have a couple
of machines on which 
>> I'm going to be running a couple of VMs on with Xen
so I'll have at least 
>> 4 VMs and lots of mongrels too.  Plus a development
server with 
>> subversion and Capistrano to manage all the
deployment.
>
> Congrats on your technology stack. You're on a great
path, IMHO. 
>
> --
> -- Tom Mornini
>
>
> > 


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