Sometimes there are solutions in IT that solve so many problems, it’s hard to believe that not every business uses those solutions or even knows about them. Load balancing is a cure-all for many of the ailments that plague IT departments. This article explains what load balancing in networking is and how businesses can benefit from it.
What is Load Balancing?
Load balancing distributes workloads on a network across multiple servers efficiently. With load balancing in place, no single server becomes overburdened by network traffic, ensuring that end-users, whether internal or external, experience stable performance when interacting with IT services, such as applications or websites.
Software Load Balancer vs Hardware
Load balancing can function using software or hardware. Companies can purchase a proprietary load balancing device pre-loaded with a special operating system. The device’s operating system distributes traffic in an efficient way across many servers.
For software-based load balancing, no proprietary hardware is required. You can simply install the software on a standard server, from which the load balancing software manages the traffic flow. The server can be on-premise or a virtual machine.
It’s the network administrator’s role to properly set up load balancing. The network admin defines an IP address or DNS for the website, application, or task for which an organization needs load balancing. This IP address ensures that all traffic for the specific function goes to the load balancer.
From the load balancing server or load balancing device, the traffic is distributed using the IP addresses of the actual servers that will handle and share the workload(s) in question.
Different types of load balancing algoirthms control the flow of traffic to servers. It’s the job of the network admin to choose the most suitable algorithm based on their own knowledge.
Load Balancing Options
There are a few different types of configurations and options for using load balancing in networking. This section doesn’t attempt to be exhaustive—rather, it provides a high-level overview of topics that could have entire posts dedicated to them.
- On-premise load balancing: typically for large organizations that want to manage traffic flow on a network from internal applications with heavy use, such as CRM systems.
- Internet-facing load balancing: companies can distribute incoming Internet traffic (to their website, for example) efficiently between many servers.
- Cloud load balancing: distributes workloads across many computing resources in the cloud and on-premise using a service-based model.
- Content-based load balancing: an approach to load balancing in which different groups of servers handle different types of requests, such as video streaming, downloads, and web pages.
- Global server load balancing: distributes traffic across server resources located in multiple regions around the world.
Benefits of Load Balancing
Given the definition of load balancing, it would be easy to assume that network efficiency is the only important benefit. However, the picture is bigger than that, and IT departments at small, medium, and large businesses have much to gain from using load balancing.
Scalability
One of the best benefits of load balancing that accommodates offloading traffic to the cloud is scalability. Maybe you’re a small consumer goods business selling merchandise online and your web servers can handle your online store traffic most of the time. But, during specific times of the year, such as Black Friday, you experience traffic surges and your servers become overburdened, leading to failure.
Load balancing addresses this exact need for scalable computing resources. By using load balancing, you can offload traffic to the cloud during times of peak demand, whether that means for specific days during the year of specific times. Read about different ways to connect to the cloud.
Redundancy
In the case of a small, fast-growing business, there is a need to expand beyond using a single server to deliver customer-facing websites or use business-critical applications. A single point of failure can cost your business a lot of money.
However, even if a business has multiple web servers, it’s possible for a server to fail. Without load balancing in place, all the requests made to the failed server cannot be answered, which affects the end users. With load balancing in place, you achieve redundancy. Traffic is automatically redirected to working servers, meaning your critical applications and websites aren’t noticeably impacted by the failure of one server.
DDoS Mitigation
One of the most overlooked benefits of load balancing in networking is in the area of network security. Using a software-based load balancer with the option to offload traffic to the public cloud provides cost-effective protection against DDoS attacks.
In a DDoS attack, a third party attempts to overwhelm IT resources by inundating an organization’s servers with a barrage of requests to the point that they stop working. From a business continuity perspective, DDoS attacks can be incredibly damaging. The use of load balancing is cost-effective and elastic in mitigating DDoS attacks. Software-based solutions with intelligent analytics can offload large numbers of server requests to public cloud servers when DDoS attacks are identified.
Performance
Your business-critical apps and websites work better with load balancing in place. Downtime is dramatically reduced. Content-based load balancing ensures servers are optimized to deal with specific types of requests, resulting in further performance boosts.
Reliability
With global server load balancing, or even cross-regional load balancing, you become less susceptible to conditions in one area and your critical apps become more reliable. For example, say you’re a small marketing company from Heuston hosting a business-critical application, and your employees work remotely. If there’s a severe weather event or power outage in Houston, all your servers go down, and nobody can access the business-critical app. With load balancing, different servers in different geographical areas can host the application and the load balancer can direct end user requests to these servers.
Summary
Load balancing can benefit businesses of all sizes by managing the distribution of workloads between servers. A load balancing solution, whether software or hardware-based, should be a prime consideration of any company’s IT department and network administrator.