What is a Load Balancer?
Is a method of distributing user load across multiple pool of resources so that applications have high availability to provide a high user experience when millions of users are trying to access the application.
It is placed between client and server groups that supports the applications.
Lets’ start with Why?
Modern applications process millions of requests simultaneously, which is expected to return data to each user accessing the application in a fast and reliable manner. A load balancer is a device that acts as a coordinator and ensures all server groups are used equally.
Scenario to understand the role of Load Balancer
Imagine you have a train to catch, and you realize you have forgotten your toothbrush. You spot a supermarket on the way and decide to pick up a toothbrush from here. However, after completing your purchase, you discover that only one of the eight checkout lines is operational, and a total of nine individuals are already waiting in line with various items in their baskets, some on a monthly basis, others on a weekly basis, and you alone with a single item.
Now, the supermarket administrator decides to open all the checkout lines, which will reduce your wait time by 8 times. In the world of modern application technology stacks, consider supermarket administrators to be load balancers.
Benefits of Load Balancing
Below are some benefits of using load balancing:
1. Availability
- Server maintenance without downtime
- Automatic disaster recovery
- Perform checks to prevent downtime
2. Scalability
- Prevents traffic bottlenecks at any one server
- Predicts application traffic to accurately determine server capacity
- Adds redundancy to scale application
3. Security
- Monitor traffic and block malicious content
- Automatically redirect attack traffic to multiple backend servers to minimize impact
- Route traffic to a group of network firewalls
4. Performance
- Distribute load evenly across all the servers. This is performance profit
- Redirect client requests to geographically closer server to reduce latency
- Ensure reliability and performance of physical and virtual computing resources
In this post, we discussed about what, why and benefits of load balancers. In the next post we will be discussing on load balancing algorithms and how actually load balancers work. So stay tuned and stay curious.
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