Better load balancer health checks and retries

We've updated our load balancer configurations with several improvements to provide your users a better experience.

Least Connections Policy

We've changed the default load balancer policy to use a least connection policy instead of random. Requests will now be forwarded to the least busy upstream server which works well with unpredictable traffic. This should be an improvement from Caddy's default random policy.

Of course, you can always choose a specific load balancer policy in your cluster settings if you'd prefer a different strategy.

Retries on by default

Previously, load balancers would retry a request only if active health checks were enabled. Retries are now always enabled.

Passive health checks

We've also introduced passive health checks. When a request is forwarded to an upstream server and fails, the upstream is marked as unhealthy. Combined with active health checks, you can ensure that requests are only forwarded to healthy upstreams.

Combined with retries, requests will be sent to the next healthy server to help ensure users don't see errors.

Try it out

Update your load balancer servers to update to the latest configuration.

For more details on how load balancers are configured in Hatchbox, see our load balancer documentation.