Persistence—otherwise known as stickiness—is a technique implemented by ADCs to ensure requests from a single user are always distributed to the server on which they started.
Sticky session, or session persistence occurs when the load balancer creates a connection between a network and a user for a direction of the session.
Requests for sessions from a client in a sticky session means all requests go to the same machine that received the first request.
Sticky sessions ensure that the connection between the client and the network during a session is not lost as a result of requests being routed to different servers.
However, sticky sessions can cause uneven load distributions across servers.
Load Balancer
If user sessions depend on the client always connecting to the same backend, you can send a cookie to the client to enable sticky sessions.
Sticky sessions are only visible at the load balancer layer; the cookies used for sticky sessions are both set and stripped at the load balancer. Because those cookies are not present in the request sent to the backend Droplets, backend applications cannot use them.
Sticky sessions send subsequent requests from the same client to the same Droplet by setting a cookie with a configurable name and TTL (Time-To-Live) duration. The TTL parameter defines the duration the cookie remains valid in the client’s browser. This option is useful for application sessions that rely on connecting to the same Droplet for each request.
Note that sticky sessions do not work with SSL passthrough (port 443 to 443). However, they do work with SSL termination (port 443 to 80) and HTTP requests (port 80 to 80).
