About using load balancers

Load balancers are not a best practice for SC4S. The exception to this is a narrow use case where the syslog server is exposed to untrusted clients on the internet, for example, with Palo Alto Cortex.

Considerations

• UDP can only pass a load balancer using DNAT and source IP must be preserved. If you use this configuration, the load balancer becomes a new single point of failure.
• TCP/TLS can use either a DNAT configuration or SNAT with “PROXY” Protocol enabled SC4S_SOURCE_PROXYCONNECT=yes.
• TCP/TLS load balancers do not consider the weight of individual connection load and are frequently biased to one instance. Vertically scale all members in a single resource pool to accommodate the full workload.

Alternatives

The best deployment model for high availability is a Microk8s based deployment with MetalLB in BGP mode. This model uses a special class of load balancer that is implemented as destination network translation.