External Load balancer versus built-in ALB

Posit Professional & Hosted Products
1

We use AWS ALB for balancing load across multiple nodes. I was wondering if we still need to configure the built-in load balancer as per https://docs.rstudio.com/ide/server-pro/load-balancing.html for RStudio Server pro or as per https://docs.rstudio.com/connect/1.6.0/admin/high-availability.html for the Connect?
Any insight would be geatly appreciated.

2

Hi @Dariush,

Good question. The products have different load balancing requirements. Because RStudio Server Pro is the development environment, the nodes need to be aware of each other and there are product configuration settings for load balancing. That is not the case in RStudio Connect.

More on requirements for load balancing here: https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/360015177453-RStudio-professional-product-requirements

Also, it looks like you somehow found an old version of the RStudio Connect admin guide. We're now on version 1.8.2. Here's the up-to-date version: https://docs.rstudio.com/connect/admin/

3

Thank you Alex.
Do I understand correctly then that we would still need to configure for HA as per your posted links EVEN if we do use AWS ALB where the ALB is configured to know about all nodes?
Dariush

4

Sorry Alex. Further to the above. Assuming that we would still need to configure the internal load balancer, is it correct that we need to list all nodes under [nodes[ in /etc/rstudio/load-balancer on every node? There is no concept of a master node here. Thank you. Dariush

5

Hi, Dariush

It seems you're asking about RStudio Server Pro, and you can find the load balancing configuration instructions at Redirect

To answer your first question:

Server configurations (i.e. contents of the /etc/rstudio directory) must be identical.

So, yes, you must list all the nodes in every config file.

To answer your second question, take a look at Access and Availablity. You have the option to define either a single master or multiple masters in RStudio Server Pro.

Note that the instructions for RStudio Connect is different, and you should refer to the Connect admin guide at Posit Connect Documentation Version 2024.02.0 - High Availability & Load Balancing

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