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Rackspace Cloud load balancers and WebSockets

Recently I needed to configure a Rackspace Cloud load balancer to support WebSockets. Initially I tried TCP (which seemed to be a logical choice) but that resulted in dropped connections. Even though I didn’t expect it to work, I tried HTTP as WebSockets is effectively HTTP with a connection upgrade, but the conversation would stop after the Connection-Upgrade header was sent. Hopefully this will be of some use to someone else as well.

After some digging, it turns out that the trick is to use the TCP_CLIENT_FIRST protocol which expects that the client be the first one to pass packets to the server (for example HTTP GET requests). The documentation on these options is actually stored with the RackSpace API Developer docs.

The downside to this is that you can’t use any of the Layer 7 monitoring / verification (i.e checking HTTP status codes), but it will work just fine for mapping requests. I combined this with Nginx’s WebSocket proxy support and everything works smoothly.