Load balance

TL;DR

• You can run multiple instances of the Signing Agent
• You need to establish a NGINX load balancer to synchronize between them
• Compile your project as a Docker image, start and stop the load balancer

Overview

You should be able to run more than one container instance of the Signing Agent, and establish a NGINX load balancer between available instances. A distributed mutex mechanism (based on Redis) is used to ensure synchronization between individual instances.

Compile the project as Docker image

1. Enter the project directory: cd {project_dir}

2. Build a Docker image, this can be done with: ./build.sh docker

All necessary files are located in: {project_dir}/dockerfiles/load-balancing

Important variables

The docker-compose.yml presents:

• deploy.replicas: the number of instances we want to run
• ports: the port that accepts the requests

Start the load balancer

Start the service using the command:

docker-compose -f {project_dir}/dockerfiles/load-balancing/docker-compose.yml up aa nginx

This prepares NGINX and signing-agent images. NGINX uses the nginx.conf file to specify and rotate the requests between Signing Agent running instances, where worker_connections represents the max concurrent connections the load balancer can handle.

Stop the load balancer

Stop the service using the command:

docker-compose -f {project_dir}/dockerfiles/load-balancing/docker-compose.yml down --remove-orphans

Now you can start sending requests to localhost:9090.