Load-balancing-as-a-Service provides users with the ability to scale their application programmatically through the Neutron API. Users can balance traffic to pools consisting of multiple application servers and can provide high availability of their application through the use of intelligent health monitors. The LBaaS v2 API even supports SSL offloading with certificates managed by Barbican, another OpenStack project, as well as certificate bundles and SNI support.

The HAProxy driver offers functionality that can address basic load balancing needs, but may not be enough for most production environments. The load balancers are not highly-available and may present a weakness in the application's network architecture. The use of Octavia over the HAProxy driver is recommended for production-grade clouds and is compatible with the LBaaS v2 API.

More information on Octavia and how it may be implemented can be found at the following URL: https://docs.openstack.org/octavia/pike/reference/introduction.html.

In the next chapter, we will take a look at a few other advanced Neutron features, including 802.1q VLAN tagging (vlan-aware-vms) and BGP speaker functionality.