3 ms·
Close but I don't think it's quite 25 years! I added graceful draining to Apache httpd's mod_proxy and mod_proxy_balancer either in 2003 or 2004, and at the tim
by colmmacc 3y ago
Close but I don't think it's quite 25 years! I added graceful draining to Apache httpd's mod_proxy and mod_proxy_balancer either in 2003 or 2004, and at the time I'm nearly certain it was the first software load balancer to have the feature, and it wasn't available on the hardware load balancers of the time that I had access to ... though I later learned that at least BigIP load balancers had the feature.
At the time, we had healthy debates about whether the feature was useful enough to justify additional complexity, and whether there could be cases where it would backfire. To this day, it's an underused feature. I still regularly run into customers and configurations that cause unnecessary blips to their end-users, so it's nice to see when people dig in and make sure that the next level of networking is working as well as it can.
- robertlagrant 3y agoWell played, HN.
- skullone 3y agoI migrated some old BigIP load balancers over to Apache in 2004ish, and extended some of mod_proxy to do some "unholy" things at the time. We also did a lot of direct server return stuff when no load balancer you could buy could handle the amount of traffic statefully. Man, how times have changed, and lesson forgotten.
- djbusby 3y agoMicrosoft bought Convoy in 1998[0]. Then incorporated it into NT4sp6a and Win2k as NLB/WLBS. One of its features was to gracefully remove a server from the cluster after all connections were closed - draining. But, cluster not the same as an LB. [0] https://news.microsoft.com/1998/08/24/microsoft-corp-acquires-valence-research-inc/ https://news.microsoft.com/1998/08/24/microsoft-corp-acquire...