8 Load Balancing techniques you should know
Drritiman Boraah
Co-Founder & Chief Sales Officer at Lavelle Networks | SD-WAN Expert | Driving Customer Success in Enterprise Networking
To put simply, load balancing means to distribute workloads (data) intelligently between different computing services to improve connectivity – Reliability, redundancy and network performance. Load balancers are like traffic police. They manage traffic between enterprise servers. Load balancers are crucial today to manage evolving traffic patterns ensuring there’s no overload in enterprise servers. Load balancers provide enterprise IT teams the flexibility to add or subtract servers as per the demands and requirements of the business.
Load balancing algorithm techniques
There are different types of load balancing algorithms which IT teams go for depending on the distribution of load i.e. whether its load on the network or application layer. The selection of the the selection of backend servers to forward the traffic is based on the load balancing algorithms used. The algorithms take into consideration two aspects of the server i) Server health and ii) Predefined condition. Few common load balancing algorithms used frequently by IT teams include
1. Round Robin Algorithm
Round robin (RR) algorithm is circular distribution of requests to enterprise servers in a sequence. There are two types of Round Robin – Weighted Round Robin and Dynamic Round Robin. Used mainly for a cluster of different servers, in weighted round robin each server is assigned a weight depending on its composition. Based of the preassigned efficiency the load is distributed in a cyclical procedure. Dynamic round robin are used to forward requests to associated servers based on real time calculation of assigned server weights.
2. Least connections
By taking into consideration the number of active and current connections to each application instance, ‘Least Connections’ load balancing algorithm distribute the load by choosing the server with the least number of active transactions (connections).
3. Weighted least connections
In weighted least connections the load distribution based on both the factors – the number of current and active connections to each server and the relative capacity of the server.
4. Source IP hash
In a source IP Hash, load balancing a server is selected based on unique hash key. The Hash key is generated by taking the source and destination of the request....READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE