Neutron/LBaaS/Glossary

Root object

An object that represents a logical configuration.
It has certain features that are applied to it and spread to all it's depending objects such as:

* vendor or provider or flavor
* admin state (Up or Down)

On implementation side there are some more attributes of that object

* insertion mode and insertion-specific parameters
* backend binding information

Usually the workflow of creating operational configuration begins with creating the root object.

Vip

Object that represents an endpoint of load balancing device that has IP address.
In existing model it also has tcp port, protocol, session persistence setting. Vip is plugged into a subnet, so as an object, it has subnet attribute.

Insertion mode

Insertion mode represents a connectivity scheme between external network and the backend servers. There are several common ways of inserting a balancer into a newtork, most of them described here: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Quantum/ServiceInsertion and https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/QuantumServicesInsertion
Right now existing implementations (vendor drivers) seem to use L2 adjacent insertion, where Vip is plugged in the same subnet where pool members are.

Pool

Object that represents a group of nodes. Pool defines subnet where nodes reside, balancing algorithm, nodes itself (indirectly)
In existing LBaaS model Pool is the root object.