Server Load Balancer Fundamentals: What it Means and How it Work

Server load balancing is a technology that enables your websites and applications to keep up the performance despite a high volume of traffic or sudden spikes. It does so by sending or splitting the traffic over to various servers. When this process is carried out globally, it’s called global server load balancing (GSLB). Let’s dig deeper into the concept.

What Is Server Load Balancing?

The technique by which an appliance — the load balancer — splits up incoming traffic is called server load balancing. Placed in your data centers; server load balancers could be software-defined appliances or hardware machines. Server load balancers sit between the client and the backend machines to divide the traffic your website receives. It then distributes traffic to different serves in the backend.

It ensures each server is performing up to its optimal capacity and not getting exhausted. Furthermore, server load balancing ensures the scalability and availability of the application. This essentially means that with no interruption to your client, the load balancers will flawlessly distribute traffic in the backend, ensuring a seamless experience.

The client will receive requested content almost instantly while the server load balancer distributes traffic in the back end, which is not visible to the client. Finally, to ensure each server is working efficiently, server load balancers also check the health of the servers to avoid directing traffic to an overwhelmed or dead server.

Here are two ways server load balancing works:

  1. Transport layer load balancing: it’s a technique where TCP/IP level load balancing or DNS-based approach works. Transport-level load balancing is an approach that does not depend on the content of the application. In other words, it will work regardless.
  2. Application-level load balancing: Application-level load balancing uses the amount of traffic to decide how to divide the traffic.

Let’s now look at some of the benefits of the server load balancer.

Benefits of Server Load Balancers

Scalability

Server load balancers enable your enterprise to serve thousands or more requests with impressive response time simultaneously. When there’s a sudden spike in the traffic, it can increase the throughput, ensuring the client faces no downtime.

Availability

Load balancers uplift the availability of your serves by shifting the load evenly between the existing servers, maintaining uptime. Availability is essentially redundancy, where if one server is exhausted, the others can take up the load preventing hardware failure and downtime.

Performance

Server load balancing allows your web application to handle traffic flawlessly, even in the face of high volume. The process distributes and redirects any incoming requests from clients so that they are always available for use by other users without breaking or dropping connections.

It also means that in any complex infrastructure, you can conduct maintenance at any point without disturbing the flow of incoming traffic. Load balancers will distribute the load to other healthy servers, ensuring business continuity.

Array’s Server Load Balancer

Sever load balancers are a crucial component of a data center. They help your applications and systems accommodate more traffic without compromising performance. As a result, server load balancers are increasing the capacity of services and improving performance by reducing bottlenecks. It’s also essential because, without proper redundancy in place at all times, your company could experience an outage if any single component fails. To know more about server load balancers and their usage for your enterprise, reach out to our sales team.

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