Multiple hetzner LB

[PhilWaldmann]

Hi,

first of all: Thanks for this awesome project!!

I've done some tests on hetzner and read through the code regarding provisioning of hosts and load balancers. I'm not sure why 2 (or 3 with synchronous_mode enabled) load balancers with almost identical configuration are provisioned.
Shouldn't it be one LB with multiple services (primary, replica, sync)? Or do I miss something essential here?

Thanks a lot and best regards,
Philipp

[vitabaks]

Hi Philipp,

Thanks a lot for your feedback and thoughtful question!

You’re absolutely right that Hetzner (and most cloud providers) support multiple services (ports) on a single Load Balancer. However, we intentionally chose to provision separate Load Balancers for different traffic types — primary, replica, and sync — for a few key reasons:

1. Clear separation of concerns
   Each Load Balancer handles a specific traffic class — for example, client reads go to replicas, writes to the primary. This separation makes traffic flows and debugging more predictable.

2. Uniform ports across all Load Balancers
   By isolating traffic types, we can expose a consistent port (e.g., 6432 for PgBouncer or 5432 if it’s disabled) on every Load Balancer.

That said, we’re open to improving the design! Let’s definitely discuss:
Could consolidating services into a single Load Balancer reduce complexity without sacrificing clarity or flexibility?

Happy to hear your thoughts and continue the discussion.

Best regards,
Vitaliy

[vitabaks]

On the other hand, for more than 5 years we’ve supported an HAProxy-based setup, which does exactly what you’re suggesting: it combines all traffic types (primary, replicas, sync, etc.) behind a single service endpoint, where the client connects to one IP address but uses different ports depending on the desired behavior.

So your idea aligns well with an existing, well-tested pattern in our ecosystem — just applied through a different layer.

[PhilWaldmann]

Hi Vitaliy,

thank you for your detailed answer and open thoughts. Do you think it would make sense to put in an option where one could choose if one or multiple cloud load balancers should be provisioned? I'm happy to contribute, although I have less experience with AWS and Azure.

[vitabaks]

I think we can do this, autobase is very flexible.