What is Global Server Load Balancer?

The core function of the load balancers is to ensure your backend operates properly while your clients receive unmatched performance. This blog discusses how global server load balancers (GSLB) reduce latency and ensure your website is accessible worldwide. Since one of the biggest concerns with worldwide users is slow connection speed due to limited servers, GSLB distributes load to globally placed servers to ensure business continuity. So let’s learn what GSLB is, how it works, and what its benefits are.

What is Global Server Load Balancing GSLB?

GSLB is an intelligent way to distribute traffic across servers situated globally. It connects your clients’ requests to an available server closest to their location. Furthermore, it enables faster content delivery and efficient load management. Global server load balancers can be a part of a company’s data centers or hosted in a private or public cloud environment.

Example: Let’s think of a apparel store that delivers products nationally and internationally.

During its initial stages, the store would presumably have a lower number of orders. But as the business grows, more orders come in; especially during peak season. This situation would naturally overwhelm the capacity of a single store to deliver worldwide at the same speed, affecting its client servicing negatively. However, if the store expands its branches to different locations and gets closer to its clients, it would better cater to its clients. This means faster delivery of products and the ability to take on more orders than usual.

This is precisely what global server load balancers do. It helps you deliver content or request closest to the location of your client. As a result, it provides quick load time, impressive availability, and unparalleled performance regardless of the location.

Global server load balancing analyses data and hands smartly over the traffic to an available server, enabling redundancy and reducing latency.

How does GSLB work?

When the client accesses the website or HTTPS request comes in, the main server or origin server listens and processes the same. First, it checks for the client’s IP address and location to establish a link to the closest server. Next, the main server checks the health and availability to assess the performance of that server. Finally, the origin server sends the request to the local DNS server closest to the client and can meet their requirements. This reduces latency and offers impressive performance. While the process looks lengthy, it happens in the blink of an eye.

Benefits of GSLB

Besides the benefits mentioned above, here’s how GSLB can be profitable for your enterprise:

  • It boosts performance by sending traffic to the local DNS server, which is located closest to the client.
  • It helps with regulatory compliance by making it easy to comply with government regulations. It is beneficial for companies like telecommunication, defense, or healthcare that usually have strict rules. Since global server load balancers can serve local traffic, organizations can configure settings and set traffic forwarding preferences to comply with the rules.
  • It provides disaster management by keeping the service uninterrupted even during challenging times like power outages or natural calamities. This allows organizations to divert traffic to another location if one of the servers is unavailable.
  • GSLB can make maintenance a breeze. Moreover, when some of the servers are not functioning during migration or upgrade, the load balancer can simply divert traffic to available servers.

Key takeaways

In this blog, we have seen how a global server load balancer can enhance the availability of your websites and applications. By diverting traffic to the local DNS server, GSLB can enable the availability and performance of your applications.

Furthermore, if one of the servers is not functioning for any reason, the load balancer can simply divert traffic to other serves. Finally, it also performs a health check on servers to ensure uninterrupted service.

While there are many different load balancers with several deployment options, what you select depends on your requirements. Global server load balancing is the perfect option when you have a client base in different geographies. To know the best solution for your organization, reach out to our sales team!

Learn more about what load balancers are, along with their type and benefits, here.