Rackspace Load Balancing with SSL

Recently, Feedmagnet had its first customer ask us for a load balanced solution that would answer on both :80 and :443 (http and https respectively).  I have set up no less than 10 Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers over the last year, but never been asked to do this, so never really looked into it.

If you are looking for a tutorial for setting one up the first time, look at their three videos.  Great for a guy like me who comes from a database focus or a newbie.  

Of course, the customer did not warn us their link and hash tag would be promoted on the Today Show, so this was all a bit of a hurry.  When there was no obvious way to do it in the Control Panel, I had to search Google.  There was surprisingly little out there, so hopefully you found this easily enough:

Set Up

The "complication" here is simply that Cloud Load Balancers are able to share virtual IPs (VIPs).  The short of it is that a load balancer for each port must be created.

With that fact, it simply becomes a matter of setting up the first load balancer on port 80 for standard web traffic and making a note of the VIP.  

Then creating a second load balancer for port 443 and setting the VIP to that of the first.

The first load balancer for port 80 will appear in the list below the "Virtual IP Type" drop down.

Continue with the setup as normal after that.

Pricing

Problem solved, customer happy.  Now it is time to face the boss and explain costs!    Exact pricing for Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers can be found here.  Below is clarification on some of the language at a monthly granularity.

A single load balancer will cost a minimum of:

Instance	$10.95	This is the cost for just having the thing up
Connections	$10.95 per 100 concurrent	Rounded up, so one connection is 100. This is measured every 5 minutes and billed on the hour.
Bandwidth	$0.18 / GB *OUT*	Rackspace only charges for out
Total Minimum:	$22.00 / month	Rounded

So, the total cost of ownership (TCO) is $22.00 in the minimum per load balancer.

This means that that the setup described above is really going to cost a minimum of $44.00 per month in load balancing fees.

The above solution does not involve the far more expensive Cloud Load Balancer with SSL option.  In technical terms this more expensive setup would be called "SSL termination at the Load Balancer."  In practical terms a SSL certificate must be installed on the Load Balancer if this option is to be used.  Simply choosing port 443 for a load balancer is not the same thing and falls under the pricing described in the table above.