- Prevents Downtime It remains the principal use case for load balancing solutions. Traffic is intelligently routed to healthy servers in order to guarantee always-available applications. All businesses will have applications that are critical to their operation and assessing true risk and cost to the business in the event of downtime is complex and varied. Whilst productivity of staff can be affected, the biggest consideration is the negative experience a customer may get if they can’t access the information or service they need at any given time. As the name suggests, load balancers will distribute the load evenly between your back end servers for optimum performance. Furthermore, they act as a central control point that sits in front of your services and enables you to generally manage how traffic flows and gives you the ability to change backend servers without any impact on the user.
- Accelerates Performance Whether it’s as a result of poor internet connectivity, inadequate hardware or just high workloads, there are multiple reasons why a user might experience latency when accessing IT services. The diversity of the issues that cause latency warrant a solution that can enhance application performance. Adding more bandwidth or compute power won’t necessarily negate issues inherent within the application itself. Advanced load balancers use a combination of caching, compression and offload techniques alleviates network congestion, reduces the processing demand at the back end and accelerates transactions significantly. VMWare environments in particular can benefit from load balancing / application delivery controllers.
- Security & DDoS protection In a recent Akamai report it was reported that the volume of DDoS attacks seen in 2015 was 180% more than the previous year and that this trend would continue. Advanced load balancers have the capability to negate these risks using intelligent traffic management engines that inspect incoming requests and outgoing responses so that decisions can be made about the content of those packets. This capability allows you to automatically prevent many types of DDoS/Flood attacks. As bespoke rules can be created, the security use cases are extensive allowing you to block connections by source IP address or geo-location for example or blank out credit card details.
- SSL Offload Analyst reports suggest that around 30-35% of all downstream traffic is SSL encrypted and that figure is growing as the likes of Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Netflix and Google all revert to SSL. Advanced load balancers relieves back end servers of compute intensive encryption and decryption processes that severely hamper application performance thus negating the latency this often causes. In addition to this if you are paying for application licensing on a per CPU basis, as you are passing the CPU-intensive workload onto a load balancer you’ll save money on licensing costs.
- Advanced Health Monitoring Proactively monitoring server performance and health is standard practice within most organisations; ideally you want to know of any imminent failures or risks to performance before they start to impact the user. Advanced load balancers do more than just monitor server availability, operating at layer 7, they can inspect the health of the application itself, allowing it to detect and automatically route around problematic servers. Not only does a business get greater visibility of the environments health allowing the IT department to fix issues before services are affected, but it also ensures that users are truly accessing the most available services at any given time.
About the Author: Mike Starnes
Mike has worked in the IT Industry for over 20 years. If he's not talking technology, he'll be reading, playing football or trying to embarrass his daughters.
