Free Cloud Load Balancer?

zirius

Is anyone aware of free load balancer service? So far I have only seen https://perfops.net/flexbalancer. On a related note, how do you ensure high availability for your production services? Roundrobin DNS, or DNS with failover?

umi

Nice russian team by the way. They also brought awesome dnsperf/cdnperf sites. High availability is to remember the incoming request (usually HTTP GET /whatever), and replay it on a different backend if first attempt failed. Can be done with many ways: haproxy, nginx, h2o.

zirius

@umi said:
Nice russian team by the way. They also brought awesome dnsperf/cdnperf sites. High availability is to remember the incoming request (usually HTTP GET /whatever), and replay it on a different backend if first attempt failed. Can be done with many ways: haproxy, nginx, h2o.

Thanks for the response. Currently I'm using HAProxy as well but I do have concerns that the HAProxy node can go down.

tetech

@zirius said:

@umi said:
Nice russian team by the way. They also brought awesome dnsperf/cdnperf sites. High availability is to remember the incoming request (usually HTTP GET /whatever), and replay it on a different backend if first attempt failed. Can be done with many ways: haproxy, nginx, h2o.

Thanks for the response. Currently I'm using HAProxy as well but I do have concerns that the HAProxy node can go down.

Run multiple HAProxy. If you have the budget then use anycast and remove failed nodes. Otherwise return multiple IPs in DNS and update DNS using health checks.

To answer the original question, also take a look at https://www.gslb.me/ which has a free tier. They are kinda doing something like the above under the hood.

Abdullah

You can try Arvancloud dns service, they provide free anycast dns (roundrobin or weighted) with geoip, & auto remove failing nodes support. I have not tried these features yet, but they are present in their control panel, maybe u can tell us about ur experience.
https://arvancloud.com

tetech

@Abdullah said:
You can try Arvancloud dns service, they provide free anycast dns (roundrobin or weighted) with geoip, & auto remove failing nodes support. I have not tried these features yet, but they are present in their control panel, maybe u can tell us about ur experience.
https://arvancloud.com

Looks interesting. Worth giving it a try. They say they "currently offer" free DNS and the page looks like it is written with the expectation this might change in the future, so I don't count on it lasting forever. But a good one to test, thanks for the pointer.

Abdullah

yes, even their cdn service, nice free-tier. They recently added a pop in India too. Thinking of moving some low-priority sites there to check.

tetech

@Abdullah said:
You can try Arvancloud dns service, they provide free anycast dns (roundrobin or weighted) with geoip, & auto remove failing nodes support. I have not tried these features yet, but they are present in their control panel, maybe u can tell us about ur experience.
https://arvancloud.com

Got the following, which is strange for a company with contact info in Germany:

If you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU, which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), please consider that at this time we are temporarily unable to grant you access to the services. We are deeply sorry for any inconvenience caused by this.

Language on signup page defaults to Farsi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvan. What the heck.

Abdullah

I think they are Iran based, with a virtual office in Germany. I got this

1. Is ArvanCloud classified as a processor or a controller when processing data under the GDPR?
   Depending on the circumstances, we may be identified as a processor or controller.

tetech

@Abdullah said:
I think they are Iran based, with a virtual office in Germany.

Yeah, that is what I was starting to figure. Quite off-putting for me, to be honest. Not sure what I'm even allowed to send on that network due to export restrictions. But everyone can form their own opinion on that subject.

I got this

1. Is ArvanCloud classified as a processor or a controller when processing data under the GDPR?
   Depending on the circumstances, we may be identified as a processor or controller.

Their terms contain "boilerplate" GDPR provisions. It is a bit messed up because it says "German law" in one section, but another section refers to courts in Rotterdam. Looks like they might have been previously registered in NL and inherited some of that stuff, https://ipinfo.io/AS47823

Abdullah

They have a POP in NL for Iaas(like aws instances) used one with them earlier. If u r from US, it may be messed up, but can be used for websites in apac region, so I will give it a try, to see how it works.

tetech

@Abdullah said:
yes, they have a POP in NL for Iaas(like aws instances) had one with them earlier. If u r from US, it may be messed up, but idk. can be used for local websites in India, so I will give it a try.

The list of countries allowed to sign up does not include US, Canada, or any in Europe, which must severely limit their customer base, although of course people can put in fake info. Maybe for some people it works - India, Russia, etc. Best for me to steer clear of it for now though. Shame, it looked interesting!

zirius

@tetech said:
Run multiple HAProxy. If you have the budget then use anycast and remove failed nodes. Otherwise return multiple IPs in DNS and update DNS using health checks.

To answer the original question, also take a look at https://www.gslb.me/ which has a free tier. They are kinda doing something like the above under the hood.

@Abdullah said:
You can try Arvancloud dns service, they provide free anycast dns (roundrobin or weighted) with geoip, & auto remove failing nodes support. I have not tried these features yet, but they are present in their control panel, maybe u can tell us about ur experience.
https://arvancloud.com

Looks interesting. I'll check it out. Thanks for the pointer.

sureiam

Not free but easy:

https://www.vultr.com/products/load-balancers/#pricing

Unfortunately only down side is it's locked to one region

seanho

LunaNode has load balancers, you just pay $1/mo for the floating IP.