Load balancing as a service provides tenants with the ability to scale their application programmatically through the Neutron API. Users can balance traffic to pools consisting of multiple application servers and can provide high availability of their application through the use of intelligent health monitors.

The user experience varies greatly between the CLI and the dashboard with regard to LBaaS, and there is not much difference in the Icehouse release either. A major limitation to LBaaS can be seen in the inability to create multiple virtual servers using the same IP address and different layer 4 ports. This limits the ability to send SSL and non-SSL traffic to the same pool of servers. Advanced features, such as SSL offloading and layer 7 load balancing, are not available in either the Havana or the Icehouse release. The community is looking to address many functional and performance concerns in the Juno release of OpenStack, and beyond.

In the next chapter, I will discuss the...