In this blog post, we will discuss what is load balancing, how load balancing works and why is it important for website speed.
With the increase in active internet users, several websites built with modern technology are observing a surge in simultaneous website requests. Load balancing helps to serve the requests while making sure the visitors have a seamless website experience and servers don’t face any downtime.
Having said that, let’s see what is load balancing?
What is Load Balancing?
Load balancing refers to the sharing of high network traffic among various servers, collectively known as server pool or server farm. A load balancer ensures that the client requests are routed to the available servers so as to spread the workload uniformly. Basically, the load balancer improves the responsiveness and availability of the website. Load balancing is applicable to the 4-7 layers of the total 7 layers in the OSI model.
Mainly it does traffic redirection after checking the availability of the servers, the server is online or not. Offers scalability to add and remove servers from the server pool depending on the website requirements.
Having said that, let’s see the importance of load balancing.
Importance of Load Balancing
Load balancing plays an important role in maintaining the flow among servers and visitor’s devices/systems.
Let’s see what are the advantages of load balancing:
Reduced downtime and Reliability: A load balancer is beneficial in managing the traffic surge, distributing high network traffic among several servers, prevent server overloads. So, even if one of the servers goes down, the load balancer can instantly redirect the site to another available server. This results in reduced downtime.
Scalability: Load balancer allows website scaling. You can add the server to manage more website traffic. With a load balancer, you can evenly distribute the load among various servers and thereby prevent performance drop of your website.
On the other hand, if a load balancer isn’t configured on your server, the servers won’t handle the traffic evenly. This means that your visitors will see sluggish website performance or won’t be able to access your site.
Website Security: The load balancer offers protection against DDoS attacks. Particularly its off-loading function routes the attack traffic to a public cloud provider rather than a private server.
With that being said, now let see the working of a load balancer.
Working of a Load Balancer
A load balancer operates between the clients and the servers. Whenever a load balancer receives the request from the client, it identifies the server where it should forward the request then routes the request to the server.
The load balancer takes off the stress from high traffic server by distributing the request to the available servers. Dynamically add or remove the server based on the traffic demand.
Additionally, the load balancer offers failover along with a performance boost. It routes the workload to a backup server from a failed one. Thereby eliminating the impact on end-users.
Conclusion
We hope with this article, you understood what is load balancing and the working of load balancing.
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