Intent-Driven, Fully-Automated Deployment of Anycasted Load Balancers with HAProxy and Python

Keeping your service configuration aligned over hundreds of hosts is never a simple task. This talk will illustrate how the University of Paderborn automated the integration of HAProxy into our infrastructure. As our current generation of load balancer appliances approached end of life and we thought about improving how we managed our services, our goal was clear: we needed a scalable, consistent, active-active setup of load balancers that could be easily automated with open-source tools. We achieve scalability with Anycast but needed to make sure the configurations could keep up with application changes. To accomplish this, we created a generic YAML-based abstraction of our services sourced by Python to generate the configuration for our HAProxy, monitoring and web server configuration. This talk will describe our solution, including pitfalls of this setup, and what we learned throughout the process.