Introduction
Cloud load balancing is the process of distributing workloads across computing resources in a cloud computing environment and carefully balancing the network traffic accessing those resources. Load balancing enables organizations to meet workload demands by routing incoming traffic to multiple servers, networks or other resources, while improving performance and protecting against disruptions in services. Load balancing also makes it possible to distribute workloads across two or more geographic regions.
Cloud load balancing helps enterprises achieve high performance levels for potentially lower costs than traditional on-premises load balancing technology. Cloud load balancing takes advantage of the cloud’s scalability and agility to meet the demands of distributed workloads with high numbers of client connections. It also improves overall availability, increases throughput and reduces latency.
Working of Load Balancing
Actually Load does not refer to only the website traffic but it also includes the CPU load, network load and memory capacity of every server. A load balancing technique always makes sure that each and every system connected to the network has the same amount of workload at any instant of time. This ensures that neither any of them is excessively over-loaded, nor under-utilized.
The load balancer always distributes data depending upon how busy each server or node is a particular time. In the absence of a load balancer, the client must wait while his process gets processed, which might be too tiring and demotivating for him and it is not recommended at any point in time. Various types of information like jobs waiting in the queue, CPU’s processing rate, job arrival rate, etc. are exchanged between the processors during the load balancing process. Failure in the right implementation of the load balancers can lead to serious problems, and data getting lost is one of them.
Benefits of Cloud Load-balancing
•High-availability: While multiple servers are put together into practice, it boosts availability. For example, if one server becomes unresponsive, the load will be picked by other back end servers that ensures to answer the incoming traffic and keep the services unaffected.
•Scalability: Unusual traffic spikes can influence server performance, but load-balancing provides the capability to add more servers to the group to manage the growing incoming requests. Instead of transiting to a completely new environment, you can simply increase the number of load-balancers when required. Besides, you can add or remove the server based on your site’s traffic rate and business demand. For example, an eCommerce website might experience heavy traffic during season sale, so they can include more load-balanced web servers to reduce latency.
•Flexibility: Doing maintenance work is rather easy because administrators can direct all traffic to one server and place the other load balancer in active/passive mode. This allows them to do the maintenance without causing downtime issue. The approach can be used similarly for performing maintenance work on other load balancer, with at least one server up and running, which ensure to upkeep high-availability all the while.
•Economical: Previously, load-balancers were certainly not the option for SMBs due to the high total cost of ownership. Load-balancing required monitoring and administration just like the other systems that added to the IT expense. Now, the scenario is completely different. Cloud load-balancers are economical as the cost is based on the amount of resource used, which is the ‘pay-as-you-go’ model.
Conclusion
As you deliver more services through your cloud infrastructure, you can expect an exponential increase in traffic from a variety of clients – employees, trading partners, customers, suppliers, etc. That’s not even counting the occasional and seasonal surge in demand. In order to scale your infrastructure to support the increasing demand as well as maintain acceptable levels of responsiveness and availability, you need to make sure you incorporate load balancing into your cloud endeavors.