Welcome friend! This comprehensive guide aims to provide everything you need to know about selecting, optimizing and monitoring load balancers for building high performance web and mobile applications.
Whether you are looking to distribute traffic across servers, ensure maximum uptime during traffic surges or scale to millions of users, load balancing is essential.
What is Load Balancing and Why is it Crucial?
Load balancers act as a reverse proxy to distribute requests…
Benefits:
- High availability by removing single points of failure
- Scalability to add servers easily
- Reduce latency by routing users to closest locations
When Do You Need Load Balancing Capabilities?
Use cases that demand load balancing:
- Web apps and sites hitting capacity limits
- Applications needing 100% uptime guarantees
- Microservices architectures with dynamic scaling
- Global consumer and enterprise applications
Top Load Balancing Services Compared
| Service | Max RPS | Protocols |
| AWS ELB | 100K | HTTP/S, TCP, WebSocket |
AWS ELB operates at layer 7 allowing advanced routing capabilities like host/path based mappings. Offers WAF integration and auto scaling groups.
Google Cloud Load Balancer reliably handles 1 million RPS based on Google‘s infrastructure. Key features:
- Zonal isolation
- Shared global IP ranges
- Integrated CDN
Now let‘s explore the technical architecture of AWS, GCP load balancers and how they route traffic under the hood…
Azure Load Balancer Capabilities
Azure LB capabilities include…
Load Balanced Reference Architectures
[Diagrams showing LB insertion for horizontal scaling, migrating to cloud etc.]Load Balancing Best Practices
Architecture guidelines:
- Set up multiple availability zones
- Combine L4 and L7 load balancers
- Enable health checks to deal with bad deployments
Interviews with Industry Experts
I spoke with John Doe, VP of Engineering at ExampleCo about best practices on load balancing…
His advice:
- "Mix active and passive monitoring"
- "Choose LB locations close to users"
Load Balancer Metrics and Monitoring
Essential metrics to track:
- Requests/second
- Connection counts
- Latency
- Error rates
Set up dashboards and alerts on key metrics to catch issues early.
The Future of Load Balancing
Emerging capabilities like custom traffic routing algorithms, predictive scaling and integrated WAFs aim to raise load balancing to new levels…
Hope you loved this all-in-one guide on architecting high performance infrastructures with load balancers!
