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WHAT IS LOAD BLANCING

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9 views2 pages

WHAT IS LOAD BLANCING

Uploaded by

sanjay.norloxsolutions
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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WHAT IS LOAD BLANCING?

Load balancing refers to efficiently distributing incoming network traffic across a group of
backend servers, also known as a server farm or server pool.

Modern high-traffic websites must serve hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of concurrent
requests from users or clients and return the correct text, images, video, or application data, all
in a fast and reliable manner. To cost-effectively scale to meet these high volumes, modern
computing best practice generally requires adding more servers.

A load balancer acts as the “traffic cop” sitting in front of your servers and routing client
requests across all servers capable of fulfilling those requests in a manner that maximizes speed
and capacity utilization and ensures that no one server is overworked, which could degrade
performance. If a single server goes down, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining
online servers. When a new server is added to the server group, the load balancer
automatically starts to send requests to it.
In this manner, a load balancer performs the following functions:

 Distributes client requests or network load efficiently across multiple servers


 Ensures high availability and reliability by sending requests only to servers that are online
 Provides the flexibility to add or subtract servers as demand dictates

Load Balancing Algorithms


Different load balancing algorithms provide different benefits; the choice of load balancing
method depends on your needs:

 Round Robin – Requests are distributed across the group of servers sequentially.
 Least Connections – A new request is sent to the server with the fewest current connections
to clients. The relative computing capacity of each server is factored into determining which
one has the least connections.
 IP Hash – The IP address of the client is used to determine which server receives the request.

Session Persistence
Information about a user’s session is often stored locally in the browser. For example, in a
shopping cart application the items in a user’s cart might be stored at the browser level until
the user is ready to purchase them. Changing which server receives requests from that client in
the middle of the shopping session can cause performance issues or outright transaction
failure. In such cases, it is essential that all requests from a client are sent to the same server for
the duration of the session. This is known as session persistence.

The best load balancers can handle session persistence as needed. Another use case for session
persistence is when an upstream server stores information requested by a user in its cache to
boost performance. Switching servers would cause that information to be fetched for the
second time, creating performance inefficiencies.

Dynamic Configuration of Server Groups


Many fast-changing applications require new servers to be added or taken down on a constant
basis. This is common in environments such as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which
enables users to pay only for the computing capacity they actually use, while at the same time
ensuring that capacity scales up in response traffic spikes. In such environments it greatly helps
if the load balancer can dynamically add or remove servers from the group without interrupting
existing connections.

Hardware vs. Software Load Balancing


Load balancers typically come in two flavors: hardware-based and software-based. Vendors of
hardware-based solutions load proprietary software onto the machine they provide, which
often uses specialized processors. To cope with increasing traffic at your website, you have to
buy more or bigger machines from the vendor. Software solutions generally run on commodity
hardware, making them less expensive and more flexible. You can install the software on the
hardware of your choice or in cloud environments like AWS EC2.

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