Now, HAProxy and agents can announce the support for "pipelining" and/or "async"
capabilities during the HELLO handshake. For now, HAProxy always announces the
support of both. In addition, in its HELLO frames. HAproxy adds the "engine-id"
key. It is a uniq string that identify a SPOE engine.
The "pipelining" capability is the ability for a peer to decouple NOTIFY and ACK
frames. This is a symmectical capability. To be used, it must be supported by
HAproxy and agents. Unlike HTTP pipelining, the ACK frames can be send in any
order, but always on the same TCP connection used for the corresponding NOTIFY
frame.
The "async" capability is similar to the pipelining, but here any TCP connection
established between HAProxy and the agent can be used to send ACK frames. if an
agent accepts connections from multiple HAProxy, it can use the "engine-id"
value to group TCP connections.
It defines the variable to set when an error occurred during an event
processing. It will only be set when an error occurred in the scope of the
transaction. As for all other variables define by the SPOE, it will be
prefixed. So, if your variable name is "error" and your prefix is "my_spoe_pfx",
the variable will be "txn.my_spoe_pfx.error".
When set, the variable is the boolean "true". Note that if "option
continue-on-error" is set, the variable is not automatically removed between
events processing.
"maxconnrate" is the maximum number of connections per second. The SPOE will
stop to open new connections if the maximum is reached and will wait to acquire
an existing one.
"maxerrrate" is the maximum number of errors per second. The SPOE will stop its
processing if the maximum is reached.
These options replace hardcoded macros MAX_NEW_SPOE_APPLETS and
MAX_NEW_SPOE_APPLET_ERRS. We use it to limit SPOE activity, especially when
servers are down..
By default, for a specific stream, when an abnormal/unexpected error occurs, the
SPOE is disabled for all the transaction. So if you have several events
configured, such error on an event will disabled all followings. For TCP
streams, this will disable the SPOE for the whole session. For HTTP streams,
this will disable it for the transaction (request and response).
To bypass this behaviour, you can set 'continue-on-error' option in 'spoe-agent'
section. With this option, only the current event will be ignored.
It is a way to set the maximum time to wait for a stream to process an event,
i.e to acquire a stream to talk with an agent, to encode all messages, to send
the NOTIFY frame, to receive the corrsponding acknowledgement and to process all
actions. It is applied on the stream that handle the client and the server
sessions.
A new "option spop-check" statement has been added to enable server health
checks based on SPOP HELLO handshake. SPOP is the protocol used by SPOE filters
to talk to servers.
SPOE makes possible the communication with external components to retrieve some
info using an in-house binary protocol, the Stream Processing Offload Protocol
(SPOP). In the long term, its aim is to allow any kind of offloading on the
streams. This first version, besides being experimental, won't do lot of
things. The most important today is to validate the protocol design and lay the
foundations of what will, one day, be a full offload engine for the stream
processing.
So, for now, the SPOE can offload the stream processing before "tcp-request
content", "tcp-response content", "http-request" and "http-response" rules. And
it only supports variables creation/suppression. But, in spite of these limited
features, we can easily imagine to implement a SSO solution, an ip reputation
service or an ip geolocation service.
Internally, the SPOE is implemented as a filter. So, to use it, you must use
following line in a proxy proxy section:
frontend my-front
...
filter spoe [engine <name>] config <file>
...
It uses its own configuration file to keep the HAProxy configuration clean. It
is also a easy way to disable it by commenting out the filter line.
See "doc/SPOE.txt" for all details about the SPOE configuration.
Christopher Faulet