Brief Overview: Load Balancer

You have probably heard about Load Balancers. Whenever you visit any big website like Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc., a load balancer plays a big role in the backend by distributing load to different servers. A load Balancer basically used to maintain the uptime and availability of websites by distributing load among web servers.

A brief overview of Load Balancer

We generally use Load Balancers, where there is a need to distribute the load to multiple physical or virtual servers. Although it is invisible to end-users, it plays a big role in providing availability and maintaining website uptime to end-users. It is widespread to use the load balancer in large implementations as well. People are assessing your website from different locations worldwide, and to provide availability, organizations deploy many web servers while hosting big or small applications. To distribute a load among different web servers, we use load balancers.

Apart from distributing load among physical servers, it can do other functions that help your website run smoothly. Fault tolerance is also one of the valuable features of the load balancer. It automatically migrates traffic from the bad server to the good server so that your website user is able to use your website without any hindrance. It is a swift way to keep your website fast and running all the time.

Load balancers also perform other functions, including TCP offload, SSL Offload, Caching, Prioritization of data, and Content Switching.

What is TCP offload?

It is a process where a load balancer has a single connection back to all the servers; in that way, servers need not make a separate connection every time with the user, which results in a fast response of the website to end-users.

What is SSL offload?

SSL offload is another important function of the load balancer. Generally, web servers are doing encryption and decryption of network traffic. The load balancer also has hardware that can do encryption and decryption of traffic. This helps in providing fast throughput from the website to end-users.

Caching of data

Caching of data is also provided by Load Balancer. Here, the load balancer can keep and serve data whenever requested by the end user. If it is static data, no need to process requests to the web server, the load balancer automatically serves requests speedily.

Load balancers are also able to prioritization of data which can make one website faster than other websites.

The load balancer can also distribute the load based on its content, which is also called Content Switching. It can distribute the load of one website to one set of servers and another website to different servers. In that way, it is helpful for stakeholders to manage servers based on network traffic.

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