Load balancing (Beta)

A load balancer component routes an environment's public traffic to app/web components or external IP/port backends. It requires a ready Nginx or Caddy webserver, but no runtime, deploy key, application directory or capabilities.

Configure routing

1. Add a Load balancer component.
2. Open its component page and edit the method and backends.
3. Choose ready web components in the same environment, or enter external IP addresses and ports.
4. Add public domains targeting the load balancer.

Internal component backends use loopback on the same server or a shared available private network across servers. A server's legacy local-IP field alone is not a private-network membership. Missing connectivity is rejected. Vito prepares private backend listeners, trusted forwarding and firewall rules allowing the corresponding load balancer sources.

External IP/port backends receive no Vito-managed listener or firewall. You are responsible for reachability, access restrictions, the service and its handling of forwarded headers. IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are supported.

Methods and health

The available methods follow the selected webserver. Nginx supports weights and backup backends, except backups with IP hash. Caddy accepts only default weight and no backup flag; unsupported settings are rejected rather than silently ignored. Duplicate backends and all-backup pools are rejected.

Health handling is passive, based on failed requests. There is no active health-check service. Empty or unavailable pools stop forwarding rather than falling back to an unrelated target. The overview topology shows configuration and lifecycle status, not live reachability.

Deployment and cleanup

Load balancers reload configuration during the release stage of full deployments and environment rollbacks. They skip clone, scripts and automatic live-release joins. Reload failure participates in the deployment's release failure/recovery handling.

Removing a backend component/web capability or deleting a server reconciles remaining routes and firewall rules. Removing relied-on network membership is blocked; remove the backend relationship first. Provider-observed network disappearance instead withdraws unavailable routes and reports an error for reconciliation. Keep networking and webserver jobs running, and inspect failed jobs before retrying cleanup.