Load balancing is nothing but distributing the income network traffic across a group of backend servers, which is also known as a “Server farm or Server Pool”

As you can see, modern high-traffic websites have servers that can handle hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of concurrent user requests and provide the necessary text, photographs, videos, or application data in a timely and reliable manner. Modern computing is a best practice that often necessitates the addition of extra servers to cost-effectively grow to meet these high loads.

A load balancer serves as a “traffic cop” for your servers and routing client’s requests across all servers which are capable of fulfilling those requests in a manner that maximizes speed and capacity utilization and ensures that no one server is overworked, which can degrade performance. If one of the servers goes down, the load balancer will redirect traffic to the other servers that are still up and running. The load balancer will begin sending requests to a new server as soon as it is added to the server group.

A single server will be unable to handle the entire burden when the load on a website or business application increases. To fulfill demand, organizations split workloads over numerous servers. Load balancing prevents a single server from becoming overworked, leading it to slow down, drop requests, or even crash.

Load balancing aids in the distribution of network traffic and the prevention of network failure due to resource overuse. Websites, programs, databases, and other computing resources all benefit from this method, which improves their performance and availability. It also helps with the quick and correct processing of user requests.

Functions of a load balance:

• It allows you to add and remove servers as needed, depending on demand.
• Client requests and network traffic are efficiently dispersed among a large number of servers.
• Only sends queries to online servers, ensuring high availability and reliability.

How does load balancing work?

A load balancer is a tool or application that manages load balancing. It is possible to implement it in both hardware and software. Hardware load balancers require the installation of a specific load balancing device, whereas software load balancers can run on a server, virtual machine, or even in the cloud. If you notice, content delivery networks usually include capabilities (CDNs)

When a user submits a request, the load balancer will send it to a certain server, and this procedure is repeated on every request. Load balancers use a variety of different techniques to determine which of the server can handle each request. Here, these algorithms are classified into two types: Dynamic and Static.

Dynamic load balancing

When discussing dynamic load balancing strategies, each server’s current availability, health, and workload are taken into consideration. By providing a balanced and efficient distribution, it can shift traffic from overloaded or underperforming servers to underutilized ones. Dynamic load balancing, on the other hand, is more difficult to set up. Many factors influence server availability, including each server’s health and aggregate capacity.

Example:- The store clerk will allocate consumers to checkout lines in a more dynamic manner: Here, the employee will carefully monitor the lines, determining which ones are moving quickly, noting how many clients have purchased, and then assigning personnel to them accordingly. This may result in a more powerful experience for all customers, but it will also raise the workload on the line sorting employees.

Dynamic approaches are classified into several types, including geolocation-based load balancing, least connection, weighted least connection, and resource-based.

Static Load Balancing

Static load balancing algorithms distribute workloads without respect for the current state of the system. A static load balancer is unaware of servers that are slow or underutilized. It also distributes workloads by a predefined strategy. Static load balancing is straightforward to construct, but it might lead to inefficiencies.

In the previous example, suppose the grocery store has an employee whose job it is to direct customers into open checkout lines. Consider how this employee simply goes in order, assigning the first customer to line 1, the second customer to line 2, and so on, without looking back to see how the lines are progressing. This strategy works wonderfully if all eight cashiers work efficiently; however, if one or more slips behind, some lines may grow substantially longer than others, resulting in bad customer experiences. A similar danger exists with static load balancing: Individual servers can get overburdened at times. Round-robin DNS and client-side random load balancing are commonly used to provide static load balancing.

So, from your point of view what does load balancing mean to your business? It depends on your hardware configuration and organizational requirements too. It is also critical to talk with a reputable provider about implementing and customizing this solution. Each network faces distinct challenges and is bound by distinct restrictions. eTechSupport can work with you to provide a solution that is tailored to your specific needs.

Load balancing can be performed with hardware, virtual appliances, or software – so assess the advantages of each before committing. We provide customizable solutions that can be tailored to the exact requirements of your environment. Please contact us.