What is Load Balancing? Should you really consider it?

03.06.2019 1,452 3

Martin Pramatarov

The connectivity speed has never been so important. Whatever the size of your organization is, you need fast and stable network performance. Any issue can mean losses of sales and customer dissatisfaction. Here comes the load balancing. It helps you have better distribution and a sustainable network. It manages the traffic over different servers depending on the load.

Load balancing has been around for a long time. Initially, it was placed between the end devices and the application servers. It would check the load of the servers and send traffic to the one with less load.

The load balancing has evolved during the years and now is not just a simple distribution method. There are load balancers with different purposes – for applications, between servers or many routes to one. The load balancer can have many additional features like traffic health check, additional security, and better availability.

Choosing the right load balancing method for you is not an easy task. You want availability 100% of the time. We can classify the load balancing in 3 types: physical, virtual and cloud-based.

Physical Load Balancer

The most common load balancer. It is located right after the firewall and before the server/s. In it the firewall, cache server, SSL accelerators, all-in-one gatekeeper, ADCs can be included.

It is an actual physical device. This makes it an expensive option. You will need to buy both the hardware and the software for it. Also, it is not practical at all if you want to have global presence.

Virtual Load Balancer

Here we are not talking about a specific hardware device. The virtual load balancer runs on a virtual machine. The software manages the traffic. It is cheaper and can work on different hardware. The problem with this one is that the updates can mean downtime.

Cloud-based Load Balancer

One advanced and practical solution is the cloud-based one. It has a wide variety of functionalities like interruptions management, failover, network issues diagnostics, and traffic distributions.

It is fast and dramatically reduces the load on applications.
It is secure. It can stop different types of DDoS attacks.
Low starting price. You can choose different prices depending on your needs and easily upgrade if you need more.

A cloud-based loading balancer can have the so-called GEO DNS. It checks the IP addresses of the customers and redirects them to the closest server. You can create a whole CDN with it and provide excellent speed and reliability.

Conclusion

Load balancing is a must-have for every medium and large business. 100% uptime and extra protection will give you a competitive edge over your competition. Load balancing is the easiest way to forget about the downtime and the slow web site loading.