Mongrel, non-Rails serving and a hardware load balancer

Rails Deployment
1

Hi again everyone!

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?

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.

As always, thanks again!

Raul

2

On Feb 26, 9:57 am, Raul [email protected] 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. :slight_smile:

–
– Tom M.

3

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: “[email protected]” [email protected]
To: “Deploying Rails” [email protected]
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2007 3:16 PM
Subject: [Rails-deploy] Re: Mongrel, non-Rails serving and a hardware
load
balancer