Load Balancing-Introduction

Load balancing involves directing traffic and distributing workloads across multiple components using a specialized mechanism called load balancers.

In this platform, a load balancer node is automatically added when scaling application servers to distribute requests among backends. Additionally, you can manually add and scale load balancer instances within the environment topology if required.

Currently, the platform offers five managed load balancer stacks to choose from:

Popular open-source server NGINX is renowned for its top-notch performance, which guarantees effective application hosting. There is no additional setup or pre-configuration needed when using NGINX.

Because of its scalability, security, and resource efficiency, it is an affordable and highly available platform for hosting applications, with built-in Layer 7 load balancing and content caching.

Know more about how to configure the NGINX Load balancer within a few minutes.

For TCP and HTTP-based applications, HAProxy (enormous Availability Proxy) is a quick and dependable open-source solution that can handle enormous traffic levels. It offers high availability, load balancing, and proxying. HAProxy employs an event-driven, single-process request-handling approach, just like the NGINX balancer.

HAProxy can effectively handle many concurrent requests at once while guaranteeing seamless load balancing with intelligent persistence and DDoS mitigation because of its consistent and low memory consumption.

Web application accelerator Varnish is frequently used as a caching HTTP reverse proxy for busy, dynamic websites.

Varnish, in contrast to other proxy servers, was first created especially for HTTP. But Varnish is integrated with NGINX (which acts as an HTTPS proxy) in the platform implementation, enabling it to process secure data and make use of the Custom SSL option.

Varnish places a strong emphasis on the speed attained through caching, which greatly enhances website performance by delegating the delivery of static assets.

Know more about how to configure the Varnish Load balancer within a few minutes.

With its modular design, the Apache load balancer is an open-source traffic distribution server that allows for a great deal of customization. It offers advantages including security, high availability, speed, dependability, and centralized authentication/authorization and can be customized to meet the needs of a particular context.

A high-performance HTTP load-balancing commercial product is called LiteSpeed Web ADC (Application Delivery Controller). Together with cutting-edge security features like web application firewall protection and layer-7 anti-DDOS filtering, it integrates cutting-edge technologies like HTTP/3 and QUIC transport protocol support.

Enterprise-level performance improvements including caching, acceleration, optimization, and offloading are also offered by LiteSpeed Web ADC.

Using many compute nodes with a load balancer is the optimum configuration for production since it provides high system availability and redundancy.

Monitoring Backend Health

The default health check implementation that each environment-level load balancer has is designed to make sure that backends are reachable and operating as intended. The specifics for each are as follows:

• NGINX: Before forwarding a user request, it does a quick TCP check to see if the necessary server port is available. The load balancer will try the subsequent node in the layer if the check is unsuccessful.
• HAProxy: carries out routine TCP checks (every two seconds by default), continuously updating a table of backend states with the results.
• Apache Balancer: By default, no health check method is in place.
• Varnish: Gives all backends in the balancer configurations the following parameters for health checks: once per minute with a 30-second timeout.

Every second, LiteSpeed ADC uses the internal IP to do a TCP check with a one-second timeout. By default, the Worker Group level implements this health check feature.

Using the file manager GUI or SSH, you can manually change the default health check settings to suit your requirements. For comprehensive instructions on setting up health checks for NGINX, HAProxy, Apache Balancer, Varnish, and LiteSpeed, consult the official documentation.