Load Balancing Defined

Load balancing is defined as the efficient distribution of application or network traffic across multiple servers in a server farm.

Simply, load balancing is completed by a load balancer. A load balancer  controls network traffic by ensuring all servers and routing requests  are capable of fulfilling requests to ensure maximum speed and capacity utilization, whilst also ensuring no server is overworked. If a single server goes down, the load balancer redirects the traffic to the remaining online servers.

The broad, main functions that a load balancer performs include:

• Distributing client requests or network load efficiently across multiple servers
• Ensuring high availability and reliability by sending requests only to servers that are online
• Providing the flexibility to add or subtract servers as demand dictates

A load balancer may be:

• A physical device running on specialized hardware or a software process.
• Incorporated into application delivery controllers designed to more broadly improve the performance and security, regardless of where they’re hosted.
• Able to leverage many possible load balancing algorithms.

Benefits of a load balancing include;

• Reduced Downtime
• Scaleable
• Redundancy
• Flexibility
• Efficiency
• Global Server Load Balancing

In Data Defined, we help make the complex world of data more accessible by explaining some of the most complex aspects of the field.

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