JIRA Data Center Load Balancer examples

Load Balancing Stickiness Strategies

Jira requires sticky HTTP sessions. Using a cookie strategy approach for this will give you more control over user IP changes that occur due to network or VPN configuration.
At minimum, you want the user to become sticky to a server during a browser session. To get the best distribution/stickiness ratio, use a session cookie lifetime with absent expire or expire = -1.

The following examples demonstrate session stickiness strategies using cookies with Apache 2.2.24 with mod_proxy_balancer, which is similar to other load balancer solutions. In the examples we use HTTP in backends, but the same applies for AJP connectors.

1) Specific load balancing cookie

This is the less intrusive approach where your load balancer creates a specific cookie to route all the requests from the same session to the same backend server.
In this example, we will instruct Apache to create a cookie called ROUTEID, and use it for stickysession.

mod_proxy_balancer with specific cookie

Header add Set-Cookie  "ROUTEID=.%{BALANCER_WORKER_ROUTE}e; path=/" env=BALANCER_ROUTE_CHANGED

<Proxy balancer: //jira-cluster>

     BalancerMember http: //backend1:8090 route=perftest1

     BalancerMember http: //backend2:8090 route=perftest2

</Proxy>

ProxyPass / balancer: //jira-cluster/ stickysession=ROUTEID

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