The concept of induced demand is a very real one for motor vehicle traffic, but it doesn’t apply to internet traffic quite the same way. You may not be able to build your way out of traffic congestion on the roads, but along the information superhighway it is much more of a doable proposition. And a darn good thing it is, because load speeds for web applications are a make-or-break factor with whether or not people will continue to use it. Patience may be a virtue, but users have little to any of it and that’s not going to change.
The interest of maintaining or improving these speeds is the reason that that load balancer exist, and it’s also why they are more in demand than ever before. Researchers at Google have said that a load speed should never be longer than 3 seconds, and having it nearer to 2 is what all should be aiming for. If we’re going to be right honest it is the scalability of any web application that is going to do the most for this interest in the long term, but balancing load does have a whole lot of here-and-now value despite that.
All of this is going to be a topic that we’ll take interest in here at 4GoodHosting in the same way it would for any good Canadian web hosting provider. Anything related to web speeds is going to qualify around here, and we know that there will be more than a few here who do have production interests in web applications. Although chances are they’d have heard of load balancers already, but if not we’re going o cover them in greater detail here this week.
Smart Distributor
A load balancer is a crucial component of any web app’s cloud infrastructure with the way it distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers or resources. The sum of all its functions are to redistribute incoming traffic across multiple servers or resources, ensuring efficient utilization, improved performance, and ensuring web applications are as available as possible at all times. The lack of one may mean that traffic distribution becomes uneven, and this is a standard precursor to server overload and major drops in performance.
In something of the way we alluded to at the start here, the load balancer works as a traffic manager and directs traffic with a measure of authoritative control that would never be even remotely possible with the type of traffic that infuriates most everyday people. The load balancer evenly distributes the workload, and this stops any single server from becoming overwhelmed.
The versatility of them is very much on display too, as they can operate at different layers of the network stack, including Layer 7 (application layer) and Layer 4 (transport layer). The algorithms they use like round robin, source IP and URL hash, and others have the breadth of knowhow to distribute traffic effectively based on any number of incidental factors that may be in play at the time. This is exactly what you want for consistently fast load times, and that is going to be true no matter if you have VPS hosting or another type of dedicated server setup
Those who put a load balancer in place often quickly come to see how effectively they ensure optimal performance, efficient resource utilization, and a seamless user experience for web applications.
3 Types
There are 3 types of web application load balancers
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Application Load Balancer (ALB)
This is the Toyota Corolla of load balancers in modern web applications, microservices architectures, and containerized environments. Application load balancers operate at the application layer of the network stack. Incoming traffic is distributed by the ALB depending on advanced criteria like URL paths, HTTP headers, or cookies.
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Network Load Balancer (NLB)
This type of load balancer works at the transport layer and is designed for distributing traffic-based network factors, including IP addresses and destination ports. Network load balancers will not take content type, cookie data, headers, locations, and application behavior into consideration when regulating load. TCP/UDP-based (Transmission Control Protocol/User Datagram Protocol) applications are where you’ll find these most commonly.
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Global Server Load Balancer (GSLB)
This one promotes more optimal performance by distributing traffic across multiple data centers or geographically dispersed locations. It is usually the best fit for globally distributed applications, content delivery networks (CDNs), and multi-data center setups. Location, server health, and network conditions are the key factors taken into account when a GSLB is making the decision on load balancing
Why They Are Needed
Load balancers are the most capable when it comes to the optimum performance of web applications. The first common consideration where they tend to fit perfectly if the one we talked about earlier - scalability. When demand for your application goes up, load balancers allocate the workload or traffic appropriately across different servers so no single one becomes overwhelmed or fails.
Next will be with the need for high availability. With load balancers preventing a single server from being overwhelmed it means that the reliability and availability of your application is improved. They can also route your traffic to available servers in case one server becomes unavailable due to hardware failure or maintenance. Performance optimization is made possible by evenly distributing incoming requests, Directing traffic to servers that have lower utilization or are geographically closer to the user reduces latency, and this a good example of the type of ‘smart’ rerouting that we’re talking about here.
