Configuring Load Balancer Health Checks for Cloud Foundry Routers

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This topic describes how to configure load balancer health checks for Cloud Foundry routers to ensure that the load balancer only forwards requests to healthy router instances.

In environments that require high availability, operators must configure their own redundant load balancer to forward traffic directly to the Cloud Foundry routers. In environments that do not require high availability, operators can skip the load balancer and configure DNS to resolve the Cloud Foundry domains directly to a single instance of a router.

Add Health Check Endpoints for Routers

Configure your load balancer to use the following HTTP health check endpoints. Add the IP addresses of all router instances along with their corresponding port and path.

  • Gorouter (HTTP router): http://GOROUTER_IP:8080/health
  • TCP router: http://TCP_ROUTER_IP:80/health

The configuration above assumes the default health check ports for the Cloud Foundry routers. To modify these ports, see the following sections.

Set the Gorouter Health Check Port

You can set the health check port for the Gorouter in the cf-deployment manifest using the router.status.port property. The value of this property defaults to 8080.

Set the TCP Router Health Check Port

You can set the health check port for the TCP router in the routing-release manifest using the tcp_router.health_check_port property. The value of this property defaults to 80.

Set the Healthy and Unhealthy Threshold Properties for the Gorouter

To maintain high availability during upgrades to the Gorouter, each router is upgraded on a rolling basis. During upgrade of a highly available environment with multiple routers, each router is shut down, upgraded, and restarted before the next router is upgraded. This ensures that any pending HTTP request passed to the Gorouter are handled correctly.

Cloud Foundry uses the following properties:

router.drain_wait: Specifies, in seconds, the unhealthy threshold that determines when the Gorouter stops accepting connections and the process gracefully stops. During this period, the Gorouter continues to serve HTTP requests and the health check endpoint returns 503 errors.

router.load\_balancer\_healthy\_threshold: Specifies the amount of time, in seconds, the load balancer waits until declaring the Gorouter instance started. This enables the load balancer time to register the instance as healthy.

The following image and table describe the behavior of the load balancer health checks when a router shuts down and is restarted.

Diagram showing, using red arrows and a line graph, the Threshold times Interval of the Load Balancer and how it relates to a unhealthy or healthy Gorouter threshold.

Step Description
1 A shutdown request is sent to the router.
2 The router receives shutdown request, which causes the following:
  • The router begins sending Service Unavailable responses to the load balancer health checks.
  • The load balancer continues sending HTTP request to the router
3 The load balancer considers the router to be in an unhealthy state, which causes the load balancer to stop sending HTTP requests to the router.

The time between step 2 and 3 is defined by the values of the health check interval and threshold configured on the load balancer.

4 The router shuts down.

The interval between step 2 and 4 is defined by the router.drain_wait property of the Gorouter. In general, the value of this property should be longer than the value of the interval and threshold values (interval x threshold) of the load balancer. This additional interval ensures that any remaining HTTP requests are handled before the router shuts down.
5 If the router shutdown is initiated by an upgrade, the Gorouter software is upgraded.
6 The router restarts. The router returns Service Unavailable responses for load balancer health checks for 20 seconds; during this time the routing table is preloaded. The duration of the health check Service Unavailable response is configurable using the manifest property `router.requested_route_registration_interval_in_seconds`, which defaults to 20 seconds.
7 The routers begins returning Service Available responses to the load balancer health check.
8 The load balancer considers the router to be in a healthy state. The time between step 7 and 8 is specified by the health check interval and threshold configured for your load balancer (health check threshold x health check interval).
9 Shutdown and upgrade of the other router begins.
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