Bloodhound: Load Balancing

Legacy Documentation
You're viewing legacy documentation for API Fortress (deployed via an on-premises container). To view documentation for the new SaaS version of API Fortress — now known as Sauce Labs API Testing and Monitoring (with Sauce Connect tunnels) — see API Testing on the Sauce Labs Cloud.

Bloodhound has a simple load balancing capability we are going to discuss now. Before moving forward, make sure you have read the basic configuration guide.

Load Balancing Configuration

The backends in the backends.yml can alternatively be expressed as follows:

- prefix: '\[^/\]\*/upstreams'
  upstreams:
  urls:
  - 'https://server-1/endpoint'
  - 'https://server-2/endpoint'
  probe:
  count\_up: 2
  count\_down: 2
  method: GET
  timeout: 2 seconds
  path: ''
  status: 200
  interval: 10 seconds
  flow\_id: default

In this configuration, upstream is replaced by the upstreams object.

• urls: a list of URLs that will be used as upstreams
• probe: the system will probe each URL periodically to make sure they are available. The probe is optional and, if omitted, Bloodhound will always consider URLs as functional.
  • path: an extra path segment to be appeneded to the URL when probing
  • count_up: how many times a probe should be successful before the URL can be considered as working
  • count_down: how many times a probe should fail before the URL can be considered as non working
  • method: which method, among GET/POST/PUT/PATCH needs to be used by the probe
  • timeout: how long should a probe wait for a reply before it considers the URL as non responsive and therefore call it a failure
  • status: the expected status code
  • interval: how frequently should the probe run

NOTE: The system will look for a probe thread pool in the implementers.yml file. If no probe thread pool is defined, default will be used.

Additional Topics

Fine Tuning the Configuration: Please refer to the fine tuning guide to learn more.