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Load balancing in Kong Manager

This tutorial walks you through setting up load balancing across targets in Kong Manager.

For Admin API instructions, check out the Kong Gateway getting started guide.

Prerequisites

You need a Kong Gateway instance with Kong Manager enabled.

Set up upstreams and targets

In this tutorial, you will create an upstream named example_upstream and add two targets to it.

From the Workspaces tab in Kong Manager:

  1. Open the default workspace.
  2. From the menu, open Upstreams, then click New Upstream.
  3. For this example, enter example_upstream in the Name field, then click Create.
  4. Click on your new upstream to open its detail page.
  5. From the sub-menu, open Targets, then click New Target.
  6. In the target field, set the value httpbin.org:80, and click Create.
  7. Create another target, this time for mockbin.org:80.
  8. Open the Services page.
  9. Open your example_service, then click Edit.
  10. Change the Host field to example_upstream, then click Update.

You now have an upstream with two targets, httpbin.org and mockbin.org, and a service pointing to that upstream.

Validate the upstream services

To test that Kong Gateway is load balancing traffic across the two targets:

  1. With the upstream configured, validate that it’s working by visiting the route http://localhost:8000/mock using a web browser or the shell.

  2. Refresh the page a few times. The site should change back and forth from httpbin to mockbin.

Next steps

Next, check out some guides on what else you can do in Kong Manager: