MLB - Modular Load Balancer

MLB (Modular Load Balancer) is a high-performance, flexible, and modular L4/L7 load-balancer written in Go. It is designed to be easily extensible through its modular architecture and provides advanced features like zero-downtime restarts and deep integration with service discovery tools like Consul.

Key Features

• Multi-protocol Support: TCP, Redis, and Memcache.
• Dynamic Backend Discovery: Support for Consul and static host lists.
• Advanced Health Checking: Native health checks for MySQL and Redis.
• Flexible Filtering: Filter and sort backends based on rich metadata using HCL expressions.
• Load Balancing: Smooth Weighted Round-Robin (SWRR) and Weighted Least Connections (WLC) with dynamic weight resolution.
• Observability: Prometheus metrics and a built-in topology dashboard.
• Performance: Designed for high throughput with connection pooling and efficient protocol handling.

Documentation

Comprehensive documentation for MLB is available in the docs folder:

• Architecture: Core concepts and the pipeline model.
• Operations Guide: Installation, CLI flags, and zero-downtime restarts.
• Configuration Guide: Global settings and HCL expressions.
• Examples: Practical configuration snippets.
• Monitoring: Dashboard and Prometheus metrics.

Detailed module documentation:

• Backends Inventory
• Backends Processor
• Balancer
• Proxy

Quickstart

1. Build MLB: go build -o mlb .
2. Validate: ./mlb -config config.example.hcl -configtest
3. Run: ./mlb -config config.example.hcl

For production use with zero-downtime reloads, see the Operations Guide.

License

MLB is released under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0. See LICENSE for details.