What is cloud load balancing?
Cloud load balancing is the practice of evenly distributing traffic, workloads, and client requests across multiple servers running in a cloud environment. This practice delivers superior cloud optimization by ensuring that each cloud resource has a load it can reasonably manage, preventing machines or servers in a cloud environment from being either overloaded or underutilized.
Effective load balancing allows organizations to meet the demands of cloud-based workloads while improving performance, enhancing reliability, minimizing downtime, and reducing latency.
How does cloud load balancing work?
In cloud computing, load balancing technology resides between back-end servers and client devices. As requests are received, the load balancer distributes them to available servers using an algorithm that may take into account a variety of criteria, including geographical distance and server load.
What are cloud load balancing techniques and algorithms?
Load balancing in the cloud is usually achieved by using an algorithm to determine how to direct traffic. These algorithms typically fall into two categories: static and dynamic.
Static algorithms
- Round Robin forwards requests to each cloud server in a simple, repeating order.
- Weighted Round Robin assigns servers with greater capacity a higher “weight,” enabling them to receive more incoming application traffic.
- IP Hash performs a hash, or a mathematical computation, on the client IP address, converting it to a number and mapping it to individual servers.
Dynamic algorithms
- Least Connections distributes traffic to the servers with the fewest active connections.
- Least Response Time directs traffic to the servers with the lowest average response time and fewest connections.
- Least Bandwidth sends requests to the servers consuming the lowest amount of bandwidth during a recent period of time.
What are the benefits of cloud load balancing?
Benefits of effective cloud load balancing include:
- Improved performance. By automatically distributing workloads across multiple resources, load balancing enables applications running in the cloud to handle traffic spikes more easily.
- Greater reliability. Hosting applications at multiple cloud hubs enables organizations to route traffic around outages.
- Reduced costs. With software-based load balancing in the cloud, organizations can eliminate the cost of installing, housing, configuring, and maintaining on-premises load balancing appliances.
- Reduced latency. Load balancing minimizes response time for application users by spreading cloud workloads evenly across available resources.
- Easier automation. Cloud load balancing improves automation by enabling organizations to deliver insight into applications in near-real time and use predictive analytics to identify potential bottlenecks in advance.
- Faster recovery. During network emergencies or natural disasters, providers offering cloud load balancing can redirect traffic to other regions to ensure continuity and availability.
- Improved flexibility. By routing traffic to alternative servers, cloud load balancing supports the needs of development teams when performing updates, applying patches, remediating issues with servers, or conducting tests in production environments.
- Better security. Cloud load balancing improves defenses against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks by spreading traffic across multiple servers and rerouting traffic away from overloaded servers.
- Seamless scalability. Cloud load balancing solutions can help scale applications automatically and efficiently to manage fluctuations in workloads.
- Health checks. Cloud DNS load balancers automatically perform periodic checks to monitor the health of upstream servers.
What is cloud load balancing vs. traditional load balancing?
Traditional load balancing technology is hardware-based, requiring IT teams to install, manage, and maintain proprietary hardware within a data center. In contrast, cloud load balancing tends to be a software-based technology, as most cloud vendors will not allow customer hardware to run within their environment. Software-based load balancers can run in any location or environment, and they are more affordable for smaller businesses.
What is cloud load balancing as a service (LBaaS)?
Load balancing as a service provides cloud load balancing on an as-needed basis, replacing on-premises, dedicated appliances. LBaaS provides greater scalability, as load balancing in the cloud can accommodate traffic spikes without needing to reconfigure physical infrastructure. Greater availability is ensured by connecting to the closest servers, and LBaaS can also reduce the cost of investment and maintenance when compared to hardware-based appliances.
What are different types of load balancing?
Load balancing in the cloud falls into four broad categories.
- Application load balancing redirects traffic by looking at the content of a request — for example, HTTP headers or SSL session IDs.
- Network load balancing technology considers IP addresses and other network information when redirecting traffic to an optimal resource.
- Global server load balancing redirects traffic to destinations that are geographically closest to the client to minimize latency.
- DNS load balancing configures a domain to route network requests across a collection of resources within the domain.
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