Dynamic Backend Load Balancer

This project provides a dynamic load balancer using Docker Compose, which can automatically adjust to multiple backend services and distribute traffic based on configurable weights.

Features

• Dynamic Backend Configuration: Add, update, and remove backend services at runtime using a simple command-line interface (CLI).
• Automated docker-compose.yml Generation: The CLI tool generates or updates the docker-compose.yml and backends.json config files automatically.
• Automatic Docker Compose Build & Up: The init and add commands automatically trigger docker-compose up --build to build and start the containers, ensuring everything is up-to-date.
• Health Checks: The load balancer performs periodic health checks to ensure only healthy backends serve requests.
• Weighted Round-Robin Load Balancing: Requests are distributed to backends based on their weight, simulating a weighted round-robin algorithm.

Requirements

Before using the project, make sure you have the following:

• Docker: Install Docker
• Docker Compose: Install Docker Compose
• Python 3.x: Download Python

Project Structure

• cli.py: A Python script that handles backend management and automatic docker-compose.yml generation.
• Dockerfile.backend: Dockerfile for building the backend service containers.
• docker-compose.yml: Automatically generated or updated by the cli.py script to define services, including the load balancer and backends.
• config/backends.json: Config file containing backend details, including URLs and weights.

Setup

1. Clone the repository to your local machine:

   git clone https://github.com/yourusername/load-balancer.git
   cd load-balancer
   

CLI Commands

init Command

The init command initializes the backend services, generates the necessary configuration files (docker-compose.yml and backends.json), and starts the services using docker-compose up --build.

###backend1:9001:2: Defines a backend service backend1 running on port 9001 with weight 2.

Usage

```bash
python cli.py init backend1:9001:2 backend2:9002:3

add Command

The add command allows you to add new backends to the existing configuration and restart the services.

```bash
python cli.py add backend3:9003:1

remove Command

Removes a backend from the configuration by either its name or port.

Usage:

python cli.py remove <backend_name_or_port>