Choosing the right layer of load balancers depends primarily on your application’s use case. A request in a load balancer is TCP or UDP connections for L4 load balancers, or HTTP requests for L7 load balancers. Load balancers can also be distinguished by the kind of requests they handle.įollowing the OSI model, load balancers are implemented in either layer 4 or layer 7. Software load balancing is very flexible, and can be easily deployed on commodity servers, co-exist with other services not requiring dedicated servers, and offer easy instrumentation and debugging capabilities. There are both commercial and open source software load balancers. Software Load Balancers Software load balancers can be deployed and managed on your own servers. For example, AWS charges for Elastic Load Balancing by the hour, and can cost as little as $20 per month. Cloud load balancers are inexpensive, and charges are based on usage. They’re strong performers, but require hands-on management, and because they’re hardware based, they can be difficult to scale, decreasing the flexibility of the system.Ĭloud Load Balancers Public cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure, and others offer high-performance load balancers hosted in their data centers, offering the performance of hardware load balancers with the cost and convenience of the cloud. You can buy them from vendors such as F5 or Citrix and deploy them on your premises. This reduces the burden on the main CPU processing requests. Hardware Load Balancers These are hardware appliances built using accelerators such as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Load balancers can be differentiated by how they’re deployed and where they’re used. Scaling your application horizontally is highly effective and low cost, but can come with various technical challenges. Horizontal scaling works by adding more servers to the mix and making multiple servers handle the requests, and load balancers are central to horizontal scaling. However, vertical scaling has physical limits, and quickly becomes cost prohibitive.
Vertical scaling works by adding hardware resources to the server, such as CPU cores and memory, to handle more requests.
0 kommentar(er)
