HAProxy

This Ansible Playbook configures an existing virtual machine running within the European Weather Cloud (EWC), to operate as a HAProxy server.

HAProxy is a high-performance, open source load balancer and reverse proxy for TCP and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) applications. Users can leverage HAProxy to distribute workloads and improve website and application performance.

Functionality

• Layer 4 TCP and Layer 7 HTTP load balancing.
• Protocol support for HTTP, HTTP/2, gRPC and FastCGI.
• Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security termination.
• Dynamic SSL certificate storage.
• Content switching and inspection.
• Transparent proxying.
• Detailed logging.
• Command-line interface (CLI) for server management.
• HTTP authentication.
• Multithreading.
• URL rewrites.
• Health checking.
• Rate limits.

Prerequisites

• Verify the ssh-https OpenStack Security Group exists in your EWC tenancy

  💡 You may create Security Groups via this EWC Community Hub Item if pre-required ones are missing.

Usage

Deploy via EWCCLI

⚠️ By default, deploying via EWCCLI is only possible from within your EWC private network. You may override by passing the --external-ip flag upon deployment. Caution is advised as this weakens security on the deployed VM.

1. Setup working environment

pip install ewccli

2. Configure access credentials

ewc login

3. Deploy

💡 To lean about EWCCLI deployment customization, checkout the EWC User Stories: I want to use the ewccli documentation pages.

ewc hub deploy haproxy-flavour

Deploy via native tooling (Ansible)

1. Setup working environment

• Install git (version 2.0 or higher )

• Install python (version 3.9 or higher)

• Install ansible (version 2.15 or higher)

• If you plan to configure an existing VM, ensure it meets the minium requirements before proceeding:

  • VM Image: Ubuntu 24 or 22
  • VM Plan: 4 CPU cores, 8GB RAM, 40GB Disk
  • Network: Private
  • Security Groups: ssh-https
  • Floating IP: Required

  Otherwise, provision a new VM with above specifications before continuing (see EWC Getting Started: Provision a VM for details).

2. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/ewcloud/ewc-ansible-playbook-flavours-and-provisioning.git

2.1. Change to the specific Item's subdirectory

cd ewc-ansible-playbook-flavours-and-provisioning/playbooks/haproxy-flavour

2.2. Checkout an specific Item's version

⚠️ Make sure to replace x.y.z in the command below, with your version of preference.

git checkout x.y.z

3. Download Ansible dependencies

💡 By default, Ansible Roles are installed under the ~/.ansible/roles directory within your working environment.

Download the correct version of the Ansible dependencies, if you haven't done so already:

ansible-galaxy role install --force -r requirements.yml

4. Specify the target host and SSH credentials

Create an inventory file, to specify address/credentials that your local working environment should use to connect to the target VM.

Copy into the file one of the two snippets below, and replace the placeholders (i.e. values enclosed in < > characters):

• To connect within the EWC private network

  # inventory.yml
  ---
  ewcloud:
    hosts:
      haproxy:
        ansible_python_interpreter: auto
        ansible_host: <add the PRIVATE IP address of the target host>
        ansible_ssh_private_key_file: <add the path to local SSH private key file>
        ansible_user: ubuntu
        ansible_ssh_common_args: -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no
  

OR

• To connect from the public internet to a EWC public IP address

  # inventory.yml
  ---
  ewcloud:
    hosts:
      target:
        ansible_python_interpreter: auto
        ansible_host: <add the PUBLIC IP address of the target host>
        ansible_ssh_private_key_file: <add the path to local SSH private key file>
        ansible_user: ubuntu
        ansible_ssh_common_args: -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no
  

OR

• To connect from the public the public internet to a EWC private IP address

  ⚠️ This requires an SSH Bastion to be already provisioned within your EWC tenancy.

  # inventory.yml
  ---
  ewcloud:
    hosts:
      target:
        ansible_host: <add the PRIVATE IP address of the target host>
        ansible_ssh_user: ubuntu
        ansible_ssh_private_key_file: <add the path to local SSH private key file>
        ansible_python_interpreter: auto
  
  all:
    vars:
      ansible_ssh_common_args: >-
        -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no
        -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null
        -o ProxyCommand="ssh
                        -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no
                        -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null
                        -o BatchMode=yes
                        -W %h:%p
                        -i <add the path to local SSH private key file>
                        cloud-user@<add the PUBLIC IP address of the SSH bastion>"
  
  

5. Configure and apply the template

By running the following command, you can trigger an interactive session that prompts you for the necessary user inputs, and then applies changes to your target EWC environment:

ansible-playbook -i inventory.yml haproxy-flavour.yml

Dependencies

💡 Upon execution, a SBOM (SPDX format) is auto-generated and stored in the VM's file system root directory (see /sbom.json).

Operation

Checkout the following how-to guides to learn about management of the Item after initial setup:

• How to add a new backend server to HAProxy
• How to add a new SSL certificate to a server in HAProxy
• How to modify HAproxy config file