Introduction

Nowadays, every enterprise or business is moving towards the digital platform and wants to attract customers through the internet. So, users of cloud computing services are rapidly increasing. There is no way to provide personal web servers to every small or medium cloud service user. Hence, we need to find the methodology that can split the application traffic load among several computers, networks, and servers. It’s called the load balancing technique.

Why do we need a load balancing technique?

The load balancers play an important role in cloud computing. It distributes all traffic of a single application across numerous networks and servers to ensure that responses are received as quickly as possible, with maximum throughput. In some cases, a single person can finish the work within 10 days. This work can be accomplished in just one day if we divide it equally among 10 people. We can see that when we distribute tasks among several people, the workload finishes faster.

This technique increases the system performance and maintains the application’s firmness. It stops a single server to become overloaded. The load balancing protects your system against system failure. The server or network on which you hosted your application has failed. In this scenario, we can distribute our traffic to other servers.

Let me tell you the importance of the load-distributing technique via rea life example. Sometimes, you might have heard the news of the server failure of any cloud provider. Even though, your application is running and provides you quick response. Have you ever wondered how it is possible? It becomes possible due to load-distributing techniques which redirect your traffics to other data centers.

Also read:- What is cloud security?

Advantages of load balancing

There are numerous advantages of using load-distributing techniques. Let’s look at them one by one.

Increases the system performance

This technique is easy to implement for cloud service providers. Furthermore, it doesn’t take too much expense to build a load-distributing system. Therefore, cloud service providers can deliver better performance of any system to their customers at a relatively lower cost.

Handles sudden traffic

Sometimes, some organizations’ websites, shopping websites, or ticket booking websites, etc. get relatively higher traffic than usual traffic. In such a case, if the load balancers are not used with the applications, the site will become unreachable and shows you an error message.

For example, shopping website gets sudden traffic during the festival time because users get a discount on their favorite products. The university website goes down during the exam result declaration if they don’t use the load balancers. I face this situation on my school days while seeing my result on the state board website.

Very less down time with Flexibility

When your business application is getting a huge number of customers daily, it is painful if the site becomes unreachable due to server failure. With load balancers, when one node or server fails, the traffic is routed to another server, and your application runs continuously.

Currently, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, etc., all use load-balancing techniques to guarantee 99.99% uptime for their customers.

Easily scallable

We can easily scale the website traffic load. As you all know, ticket booking sites, online shopping sites, or news sites get the daily thousands of visitors. Also, it increases on the daily basis, as more people are starting to use smartphones and the internet. Using load balancers, we can easily scale the website traffic; otherwise, due to high traffic, your site starts buffering, and you will lose customers.

How does load balancing works?

If you have an illusion that the load balancer manages only application or website traffic, you are thinking wrong. The load balancer distributes all loads such as network load, website traffic load, CPU processing load, and server load, etc.

The load balancing technique provides a way to distribute the same amount of workload to every network, CPU, and server. This distribution of a load ensures that any system hardware is not under-utilized or overloaded.

It takes a while for users to get their requests processed by the system if the application doesn’t use a load balancer. For example, the plagiarism checker tool takes content as input from the user and check for plagiarism for every sentence. If a single network or hardware is working on it, it takes too much time to detect plagiarism as it has to go through the all content on the internet. So, when we give input to the plagiarism checker tool, it distributes the sentences equally among the numerous computer network and servers. In such a way, we can get quick results from such types of tools even though they have to crawl through the whole internet.

To check which server has a lower load, the system forwards the client’s request to every node. If the system finds that any node is underutilized, it provides work to that node. Most companies use the round-robin algorithm as a load balancing algorithm. However, companies are using different static and dynamic algorithms for the same.

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Types of load balancing

There are numerous types of load balancers. Throughout this article, we will examine 3 types of load balancers based on their configuration.

Hardware Load Balancer

The hardware load balancers mean that it distributes the physical device or hardware equipment to the visitors/users of the application. It provides very limited flexibility to the users. However, it can handle very high volume but it is costly in the price.

Software load balancer

The commercial and open source are 2 forms of the software load balancer. The software load balancer is the computer software that should be installed on your computer before you use that application. It s an alternative solution for the hardware load balancer and is less expensive in comparison to hardware load balancers.

Virtual load balancers

There is some difference in the virtual load balancers from the software/hardware load balancers. It fits the software of hardware load balancing on the virtual machine.

• There are other three types of load balancing based on their function.

Network Load Balancers

This type of load balancing is done on the network layer. Network load balancing is done based on the network variables such as source/destination port and IP addresses. Network load balancers distribute the application traffic at layer 4 (transport layer) via routing decision.

It can handle all kinds of TCP/UDP traffic. It is the fastest load balancing solution for the application but the disadvantage is that it can’t distribute the traffic across the various server.

HTTP(S) Load Balancers

It is the oldest way to do load balancing. In the OSI model. The HTTP(S) load balancing is done on layer 7. The HTTP(S) load balancer is the most flexible kind of load balancer. It allows us to distribute the load based on the data which we get from the HTTP/HTTPS request. It distributes the traffic based on the individual usage of applications and behaviors so that it is also called application load balancers.

Gloabal Load Balancers

The cloud service provider owns several data centers at different geographical locations. If load increases at the single data center, they transfer the client request to another data center via global load balancers. So, the user gets the best experience even though their request is processed by other data centers.

Also read:- Benefits of the cloud computing for business

Load balancing techniques

There are several algorithms and techniques for load balancing. In this article, we will discuss some of them.

Round Robin

Round robin is the most used algorithm for load balancing. It distributes the workload to every sever equally by assuming that every severs is equal. The round-robin algorithm assigns a task to every server in a rotational manner. For example, we have two servers and 3 tasks. It will start assigning the task to the first server after the second task assigns to the second server, and the third task assigning to the first server again, and so on.

Fixed weighting

FIxed weighting load-balancing algorithm distributes the workload among the server according to their weight. The administration assigns the weight to every server according to their capacity and load handling specification. When a client request comes to the server, it will be sent to the server which has the highest weight. If a server with the highest weight fails to handle client requests, it sends it to serve which has the next highest weight, and so on.

There are several other techniques for load-distributing, but the above 2 are most used by organizations.

Conclusion

From this article, we can conclude that load balancing is an essential part of cloud computing. In a website with high traffic, if 2 or more users send requests at a single time, we need to proceed with both requests at the same time. This can be done via load balancing.

If you want to attract customers to your online business, you should respond quickly to every visitor. We can do that via distributing load among various networks and servers.

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