Benefits of using a Load Balancer
- Increases performance:
- Any web server when given huge traffic may not perform well and can give down time to user and thereby degrading the performance.
- However, Load Balancer makes sure user experience no down time and gets better performance.
- Increase Scalability:
- Load balancer along with auto scaling will make sure that if your minimum number of servers are getting high traffic then more servers will be provisioned and load balancer will automatically accommodate in the server cluster.
- Efficiently manages failure:
- Load balancer makes sure that any server that is experiencing issue or is not healthy to serve user request are been kept away from the distribution.
- Prevent Traffic Bottleneck:
- Software load balancer predicts if there is going to be huge traffic rush to the servers and thus informs or warns us for taking appropriate measure.
- Efficient Resource Utilization:
- Load balancers distribute incoming requests or tasks across multiple servers, ensuring that each server handles an appropriate share of the workload.
- Maintaining User Sessions:
- Load balancers can be configured for session persistence, ensuring that user sessions are maintained even when requests are directed to different servers.
- This is essential for applications that require stateful communication.
- High Availability:
- Load balancers enhance the availability of applications by distributing traffic across multiple servers. If one server fails, traffic is redirected to healthy servers, minimizing downtime.
- Fault Tolerance:
- Load balancers provide fault tolerance by redirecting traffic away from failed or unhealthy servers, maintaining the continuity of services.
- SSL Termination:
- Load balancers can handle SSL/TLS encryption and decryption, offloading this computationally intensive task from servers and improving overall efficiency.
What is Load Balancer & How Load Balancing works?
Load Balancer is defined as a networking device or software application that distributes and balances the incoming traffic among the servers to provide high availability, efficient utilization of servers, and high performance. A load balancer works as a “traffic cop” sitting in front of your server and routing client requests across all servers. It simply distributes the set of requested operations (database write requests, cache queries) effectively across multiple servers and ensures that no single server bears too many requests.
Important Topics for Load Balancer
- What is a Load Balancer?
- What will happen if there is NO Load Balancer?
- Key characteristics of Load Balancers:
- How Load Balancer Works?
- Types of Load Balancers
- Load Balancing Algorithms
- Benefits of using a Load Balancer
- Cons/Drawbacks of Load Balancers:
- Conclusion