As websites and business applications increasingly experience strain, a single server can’t support the entire workload. To meet demands, companies spread the workload over numerous servers through load balancing.
This practice prevents one server from being overworked, which could cause the server to drop requests, slow down, and even crash. Load balancing allows you to distribute network traffic evenly to prevent failure because of overloading a specific resource.
This strategy enhances the availability and performance of websites, databases, applications, and other computing resources.
Moreover, it processes user requests accurately and quickly. If you’re seeking a solution that helps you increase performance, application availability, and cloud integration, a company like Total Uptime has what you need for your business. Here’s how load balancers work.
Load Balancers
As organizations meet the demand for their applications, load balancers determine the servers that can handle the traffic. This ensures a good experience for users. Load balancers manage information flow between an endpoint device (tablet or laptop) and the server. The server could be in a data center, on-premises, or the public cloud. It could also be virtualized or physical.
Load balancers prevent server overloads in addition to moving data efficiently. If you have numerous WAN links, the attainment of bandwidth aggregation can occur through IP based load balancing, which divides traffic according to IP address.
This implies that the sessions will take a similar WAN interface provided the destination IP/port and source IP/port are similar. Traditionally, load balancers have a hardware appliance. However, they’re gradually becoming software-defined.
Advantage of IP based balancing
IP based load balancing enhances performance in circumstances where a virtual machine communicates with numerous virtual machines.
Benefits of Load Balancing
Flexibility
In addition to directing traffic for efficiency purposes, load balancing enables the flexibility of adding and removing servers upon demand. It also becomes possible to conduct server maintenance without causing user interruption because traffic gets rerouted to different servers throughout maintenance.
Redundancy
Load balancing offers integrated redundancy when distributing traffic over a group of servers. In case of server failure, you can reroute the load automatically to functioning servers in order to reduce the impact on users.
Scalability
As the use of a website or application increases, traffic boosts can obstruct its performance if proper management doesn’t take place. Load balancing allows you to gain the capacity to include a virtual or physical server to accommodate demand without causing service interruption.
When new servers emerge online, the balancer identifies them and incorporates them seamlessly in the process. This approach is better than transferring a website from an overworked server to a new one; this needs some downtime.
Methods of Loan Balancing
Each technique depends on a set of criteria to establish the server that obtains the next request. The common methods include:
Round Robin
This default method works by directing requests in a rotating manner. The method ensures every server handles a similar number of connections.
Sticky Session
Also called session persistence, the technique links specific servers and clients for the session duration. The balancer recognizes a user attribute by tracking the IP address or through a cookie. Once the link becomes established, all the user requests go to the same server until the session ends. This enhances user experience while maximizing network resources.
IP Hash
The algorithm produces a hash key depending on the destination and source. The key works to reroute the request and permits a dropped connection to undergo re-establishment with a similar server. Load balancing is the most scalable technique for handling the numerous requests from contemporary multi-device, multi-application workflows.