Re:Minuteman: A Distributed HA Load Balancer
by sargun on Wednesday April 20, 2016 @11:04AM
(#11534901)
Co-author here!
There are several differences:
1. We're coupled with the kernel and operating at layer 4. Specifically, we play with the conntrack subsystem. This means, you may pay a little higher cost for the first packet of a connection (because we've got to program the flow), but once the flow is programmed, it's totally going through kernel space. The way Minuteman is meant to be used is to act as the underlying router of a connection pool, or some such.
2. We expose the pools as "VIPs" or Virtual IPs. When you expose a service, you specify an IP-port pair (like 1.2.3.4:5000). In my opinion, that's a little bit nicer than Bamboo's routing.
There are several differences: 1. We're coupled with the kernel and operating at layer 4. Specifically, we play with the conntrack subsystem. This means, you may pay a little higher cost for the first packet of a connection (because we've got to program the flow), but once the flow is programmed, it's totally going through kernel space. The way Minuteman is meant to be used is to act as the underlying router of a connection pool, or some such.
2. We expose the pools as "VIPs" or Virtual IPs. When you expose a service, you specify an IP-port pair (like 1.2.3.4:5000). In my opinion, that's a little bit nicer than Bamboo's routing.
3. We work with all Mesos frameworks.
4. We have an underlying distributed control plane (https://github.com/dcos/lashup), which lets us detect failures incredibly fast. We've evaluated its capabilities here: https://github.com/dcos/minuteman#evaluation