What is load balancing?
In cloud computing, load balancing is the process of distributing traffic across multiple servers, ensuring a site or application is not overloaded to the point of failure. The load balancer itself is a device or service that sits between the user and the site, intercepting traffic and intelligently assessing the load on each server in the network, before directing traffic to the server with the most capacity.
Load balancers are the perfect solution for websites with high levels of site traffic. They distribute the workload across two or more servers, ensuring that an individual server doesn’t ever hold too much traffic, causing site failure.
How can load balancing improve response times?
A website that is slow at loading or has frequent outages can be damaging for a company that sells their products or services online. High levels of traffic to a website puts a lot of strain on servers – think of the frenzied customers that try to get tickets in the Glastonbury lottery or Black Friday deals.
Website downtime issues regularly make the headlines, with many users taking to social media to express their frustrations. Our research on tolerance to downtime showed that ⅓ of customers will move to a competitor’s site after only 30 seconds of downtime, in spite of any previous loyalties. This clearly demonstrates how downtime can be damaging for a business’s reputation, leading to loss of customers, and ultimately income.
Balancing traffic through load balancing means the individual servers in the network do not get overwhelmed, preventing this slow response time or downtime.
Using a hosting provider that can quickly scale resources and balance traffic is hugely beneficial for these situations, especially for businesses that rely on their website to sell their services.
How does load balancing work?
The infrastructure hosting the site or application consists of 2 or more interconnected servers. This can consist of physical servers, and virtual machines – for more details on this network of physical and virtual resources, read our insight ‘What is Cloud Hosting’.
The load balancing process can be split into three steps:
- Incoming traffic request – When a user accesses the site or application, the request is intercepted by the load balancer.
- Server load assessment – The load balancer checks the current load on each server, and assesses which is best placed to handle the request.
- Routing – The load balancer routes the request to the selected server.
Load balancers additionally constantly monitor the health of the servers. They perform health checks on the available servers before routing traffic, so if one server is unavailable due to updates, the load balancer will reroute traffic to another server that is performing correctly. This allows maintenance and code releases to be deployed on each server individually, ensuring there is always an available server for traffic to be routed to.
How can the security benefits of load balancing support response times?
While security may not be your first thought when it comes to improving response times, it does play a crucial role. A compromised server, DDoS attack, or inefficient SSL handling can all slow down performance, or take your site offline entirely.
Load balancing plays a key role in your security strategy, acting as a first line of defense to absorb, filter or mitigate threats before they reach your core infrastructure. There are several security features that load balancing enables:
- DDoS mitigation – Load balancers can distribute large volumes of malicious traffic across multiple servers, effectively mitigating the impact of a DDoS attack
- SSL offloading/termination – Load balancers can manage SSL/TLS encryption and decryption, instead of the web servers, improving response times and security by centralizing certificate management
- IP masking – Load balancers can hide the identity and IP addresses of backend servers, reducing the risk of direct attacks on individual nodes
- Traffic filtering and application layer security – Layer 7 load balancing operates at the application layer, and can be configured to detect and block malicious traffic, SQL injection attempts and cross-site scripting
- Automatic failover – In the instance that a server is compromised or unresponsive, load balancers can automatically reroute traffic to healthy servers, ensuring business continuity
The security benefits of load balancers protect your systems, actively supporting optimal response times and service availability.
Load balancing with Hyve
Hyve can provide layer 3 or layer 7 load balancing, allowing traffic to be distributed intelligently across dedicated servers. Layer 3 balancers distribute traffic based on IP addresses alone, whereas Layer 7 balancers can make decisions based on the content of the message.
Our load balancing experts manage your platform and scale your network in order to meet traffic demands at any given time, preventing website downtime.
If you’d like to talk to one of our cloud experts about how to get the most from your hosting, fill out our contact form.
