Purpose

Bamboo Data Center needs a load balancer to run in front of it to distribute incoming requests (both HTTP/s and TCP) to the stand-by node in case the active node stops working. The load balancer must support cookie-based session-affinity ("sticky sessions"). NGINX Plus can be set up to provide this for Bamboo Data Center. You still need to follow the full installation guide available at Installing Bamboo Data Center to set up a Data Center instance of Bamboo.

For more details on the load balancer configuration using NGINX Plus, please have a look at the High-Performance Load Balancing with NGINX Plus page on the NGINX website.

Solution

In this article we will provide an example of load balancer configuration using NGINX Plus typically found inside the /etc/nginx folder.

This assumes:

• The NGINX Plus process is running under the nginx account in the operating system.
• The NGINX Plus configuration is stored inside the nginx.conf file.

• The Bamboo cluster nodes are at addresses 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2, listening on the default ports 8085 (HTTP) and 54663 (TCP).

• The server name is bambooserver.

• Users connect to NGINX Plus on port 80 from their web browser.

• You want to use sticky_route as the session persistence method.

user  nginx;
worker_processes  auto;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log notice;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  4096;
}

http {

    # Search the cookie named BAMBOOSESSIONID for data after the final '.' and store that in a variable named $route_cookie
    map $cookie_bamboosessionid $route_cookie {
        ~.+\.(?P<route>\w+)$ $route;
    }

    # Search the URL for a trailing BAMBOOSESSIONID parameter and store the value after the final '.' in a variable named $route_uri
    map $request_uri $route_uri {
        ~bamboosessionid=.+\.(?P<route>\w+)$ $route;
    }

    upstream bamboocluster {
		zone bamboocluster 64k;
        server 192.168.0.1:8085;
        server 192.168.0.2:8085;
		sticky route $route_cookie $route_uri;
    }

    server {
        listen 80;
        server_name bambooserver;
        location / {
	    proxy_set_header Host $host;
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_pass http://bamboocluster;
       	    health_check uri=/rest/api/latest/status mandatory persistent;
	 	}
    }
}

stream {
    upstream brokers {
		zone   brokers 64k;
        server 192.168.0.1:54663;
        server 192.168.0.2:54663;
    }
    server {
        listen 54663;
        proxy_pass brokers;
		health_check;
    }
}

Please review the contents of the nginx.cfg file carefully and make any changes necessary to adapt it to your environment.

Once you have configured the nginx.cfg file you can test your configuration using the following command before restarting NGINX Plus:

nginx -t

If the syntax is ok and the test successful you can restart NGINX Plus using:

nginx -s reload