August 29th, 2019
One of the many technical terms every developer, end-user, and business comes across is load balancing. What exactly is load balancing, and why is it essential for your online presence?
Load balancing is the process of distributing network traffic across multiple servers. Load balancing is important because it ensures that various servers share the network traffic instead of overloading a single server with network traffic, which slows the server down and may even cause the server to lock-up or crash. When load balancing spreads the work evenly, it improves application responsiveness and increases the availability of applications and websites for users. Most apps today cannot run without load balancing running.
Hardware Load Balancing
Hardware Load Balancing consists of dedicated systems that balance traffic among the in-service resources. In other words, it is a physical appliance used to distribute web traffic across multiple network servers. Routing is either done randomly (i.e., round-robin), server connection availability, server processing power, and/or resource utilization.
Software Load Balancing
There are essentially two categories; installable load balancing software and load balancing as a service (LBaaS). Examples of the first category would be software that is installed, configured, and managed. Simply explained, installable load balancing software is the “do it yourself” version of load balancing. With DIY load balancing, the user is faced with the responsibility of purchasing, configuring, monitoring, and maintaining the load balancing software. Hosting companies have the team available to manage all of the above.
The latter (LBaaS) is a fully managed service that the end-user is not responsible for purchasing, configuring, monitoring, and maintaining. This is typically a fully managed service done by and provided by hosting companies for their cloud computing services. One of the most significant advantages is the provided scalability provided to end users at an ultimate lower cost.
The Ultimate Importance Of Load Balancing As A Service
End-users can take advantage of increased performance through cloud-based providers, with such optimization increasing performance more than 90 percent. Ultimately, LBaas allows the end-user to work hassle-free from maintaining and managing installable load balancing software. Costs are lowered for the services provided, and the results enable end-users to maintain their online presence affordably.