Possibility of having load balancer (sort of) for control panel?

bgeek

Since we are going to have a control panel duplication function (and I really want to know if this would be released in Feb), and since for this duplication there must be some real-time or highly frequent database and file sync between the two control panels, I'm now dreaming of this: if we could have two identical control panels running, each in a different location. That would be helpful, for example, one control panel in US and the other in EU, so that US clients will visit US server and EU clients will visit EU server to take advantage of maximized speed.

I don't know if this would be a practical function for everyone. For me, as a people with Decidophobia, I have spent days if not months, but still can't decide if I should place my production control panel server in EU or in US.

Rich

I would boil that down to two questions.

1) Where is your primary market, or where do you expect the most growth?
2) Data Protection, GDPR in Europe is one of the strongest privacy regulations.

If you put it in Europe and abide by GDPR, you save yourself a ton of EU Regulations. CCPA and Safe Harbour will be ones to watch for in the USA, unless you have Health related clients and need HIPPA on top of ISO 270001.

We're talking about 110 (east coast) - 160ms (west coast) response time from USA to EU. It's not too bad.

Definitely looking forward to the CP replication feature. I am not exactly sure how this will work, but suggest you have your main CP in EU called cp-eu.example.com then maybe the duplicate CP role could be on cp-us.example.com

IF that's the case, then you'd be able to direct your clients to the US panel.

IS this feature a Master - Master or a Master - Slave kind of replication. We don't know yet.

bgeek

Rich Thank you for your suggestion! Yes, I also plan to keep the CP in the EU. Anyway, if there would be a chance to have one load balancer in the US and redirect US clients to it automatically, that would be better.

xyzulu

On this.. even if you had 2 web servers in sync (and I don't think this is necessarily what the Enhance feature related to this is going to be) you will still need a higher up "load balancer". It's highly unlikely there would even be 2 in sync databases on the 2 web servers.. there is just too much margin for error and performance issues. Instead, you would have to have a separate mysql/mariadb instance that is then replicated etc and frontend web servers that connect to this same mysql cluster.

In summary.. I doubt any load balancing for the control panel server is on the near future roadmap.. instead, I'm guessing more a way to switch to a new control panel server using a "move server" feature or a restore from backups.. or a server that is continually replicating.. we'll have to see I guess.

bgeek

xyzulu Yes, I kind of realized this idea is not practical. Let's wait for the control panel duplication function to be released. When it's easier for us to backup&restore the control panel, I will use enhance for production then.

xyzulu

Oh.. control panel runs Postgres not MySQL.. for completeness.

Adam

Load balancing the control panel would be extremely complex and prone to all sorts of issues. "Hot standby" failover is much safer. I don't anticipate that load balancing would ever be required for performance/scalability - we have some customers running huge clusters on relatively low specced control panel servers.

If you want a control panel per geographic location, there are some options. You could proxy the control panel with CloudFlare (who are likely to have more optimal routing to the control panel server than your customers' ISP) however this can cause significant issues as they limit the size of POST requests (which will frustrate clients trying to upload cPanel/Plesk backups, using the file manager , etc). Alternatively you could just run multiple clusters.

JohnB

Adam POST requests (which will frustrate clients trying to upload cPanel/Plesk backups, using the file manager , etc). Alternatively you could just run multiple clusters.

Why doesn't Enhance use a chunked upload approach to avoid that?

Adam

This may be possible in the future.

JohnB

Adam That be great if possible. It can also make uploading a large file over an unstable connection much more reliable.