What Is Load Balancing?

Load balancing is the process of dispersing incoming network traffic efficiently among a collection of backend servers, commonly known as a server farm or server pool. Modern high-traffic websites must service hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of concurrent user or client requests while returning the correct text, graphics, video, or application data in a timely and dependable manner. Modern computing best practices often necessitate the addition of extra servers to cost-effectively grow to meet these large volumes.

A load balancer functions as a “traffic cop” in front of your servers, routing client requests across all servers capable of delivering those requests in a way that maximizes speed and capacity utilization while ensuring that no single server is overworked, which could decrease performance. If a single server fails, the load balancer transfers the traffic to the remaining online servers. When a new server is added to the server group, the load balancer instantly begins sending requests to it.

GB Cloud relies on automatic load balancing services, which allow businesses to adjust the amount of CPUs or memory in their resources to keep up with demand. This service is optional and is dependent on the business needs of the organization. As a result, load balancers provided two crucial functions: first, ensuring the availability of cloud services, and second, ensuring performance. According to the previous section, cloud computing will employ a dynamic mechanism that allows cloud entities to advertise their presence to presence servers while also facilitating communication between interested parties. The IETF’s RFC3920 – Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, abbreviated as XMPP – has been updated to include this solution.

How did Load Balancers work?

A load-balancing algorithm or method is used by the load balancer to follow a specified pattern. This ensures that no single server is tasked with handling more traffic than it can handle. Different algorithms use different approaches to handle the process. As a result, you have a variety of options to select from when deciding which load balancer to use.

The following are the fundamentals of how a load balancer works:

1. A client, such as a browser or an application, receives a request and attempts to connect to a server.
2. A load balancer takes the request and sends it to one of the servers in a server group based on the algorithm’s predetermined patterns (or farm).
3. The server gets the connection request and uses the load balancer to respond to the client.
4. When the load balancer receives the answer, it compares the client’s IP to the IP of the chosen server. The packet with the response is then forwarded.
5. The load balancer, where applicable, takes care of SSL offload, which is the act of decrypting data using the Security Socket Layer encryption protocol so that servers don’t have to.
6. The procedure continues till the session is completed.

A load balancer accomplishes the following tasks in this way:

• Distributes client requests and network load across numerous servers in an efficient manner.
• Ensures high availability and dependability by sending requests only to servers that are up and running.
• Allows for the addition or removal of servers as needed.

Load Balancing Algorithms

Different load balancing algorithms have different advantages. The choice of load balancing method depends on your requirements:

• Round-robin – Requests are sequentially distributed across server groups
• Least Connections – The new request is sent to the server that currently has the fewest connections to the client. The relative computing power of each server is taken into account to determine which server has the fewest connections.
• Source IP – The client’s IP address is used to determine which server receives the request.

Benefits of Load Balancing

Load balancing provides various benefits by optimizing resource utilization, data delivery, and response time for organizations that run high-traffic websites and applications or databases that receive a lot of queries. Load balancing is what keeps user requests flowing smoothly and accurately in high-traffic scenarios. They save users the aggravation of dealing with slow-to-responding programs and resources.

Load balancing is also important for avoiding downtime and simplifying security, lowering the risk of lost productivity and earnings for your company.
The following are some of the other benefits of load balancing:

• Reduced downtime
• Scalable
• Redundancy
• Flexibility
• Efficiency