Starting A Load Balancer

Prerequisites

With the LINKED Record created, two steps remain to configure public access.

Make sure a load balancer is online.
Make sure the network settings and routes are set up correctly - which will be covered in the next section

Managing Load Balancers

Return to the environment. In the Services section on the environment dashboard, the discovery service should be online but the load balancer is not. Additionally, it can be observed that the number of load balancer instances created is 0.

Load balancer instances are not created until one of two things happens:

The load balancer instance is created manually.
Start All has been triggered in an environment that has at least one container with public network Enabled

Why?

Because creating a load balancer instance consumes an IP address from the provider it is deployed to and, generally, those cost a monthly fee. So if a load balancer is not necessary, Cycle will not create one automatically.

Manually Starting

To manually start the load balancer, find the services section on the Environment Dashboard and click the Manage button for the load balancer. This will open the load balancer container modal. It's similar to a container modal but has a few different configuration options.

Click the start button on the modal, and Cycle will create and start an instance of the load balancer.

Starting All

If the environment has at least 1 container with public network Enabled and the Start All button is clicked from the environment dashboard, Cycle will automatically create and start a load balancer.

Verify

To verify everything worked correctly, return to the environment dashboard and ensure that there is information about the load balancer IP address assignments. Additionally, in the services section, the load balancer should report 1 instance in the running state.