What is a Load Balancer?

An e-commerce website or application can face thousands of different customer requests within minutes. In this case, the servers often face a huge load. This load can prevent servers from providing adequate and necessary response. This is where disruptions occur. In order to prevent this situation, Load Balancer appears. In this article, we searched for the ones who were curious about the Load Balancer for you.

What is a Load Balancer?

Load Balancer, that is, the load balancer, with the increase in the demand of the customers on the websites, the load on the servers also increases, providing the balance for the best user experience. Load Balancer comes into play to reduce the load on the server and ensures that the network or applied traffic is evenly distributed. Load Balancer doesn't just assign the workload to one server. It distributes it to multiple servers thus making the flow much healthier. 

Load Balancer is located between client devices and backend servers and acts as a bridge by evenly distributing incoming requests.

How Load Balancer Works

The load balancer first gives the client an IP address to represent the application . Then the client connects to the VIP and the load balancer uses the algorithms of the connection there. Determines whether to redirect to any application instance on the server. It manages and monitors this process throughout the connection period. From this point of view, it also functions as a reverse proxy.

What Does a Load Balancer Do? What are the advantages?

Load balancer prevents server overload. In this way, the servers work efficiently and evenly. 

The power supplied by incoming requests and resources is balanced. Any disruption will be avoided. 

With the use of load balancer, high traffic can be provided with zero interruption. 

Load balancer maximizes resources for delivery of applications. It also moves data efficiently. Data flow and site traffic remain extremely high as server overloads are eliminated. 

The load balancer, which also reduces the load on the web servers, keeps the user experience high at all times. 

Load balancer also helps to provide the best experience to users  by compressing the traffic on your website. 

Load balancer delivers content to users in the fastest way. It caches the traffic. 

Thanks to the load balancer, a new additional layer of security is provided to the network system. Malicious traffic is caught and destroyed as soon as possible. 

With load balancing, traffic bottlenecks are predicted in a short time. In this way, prevention takes place in the fastest way.

Due to its scalability, it works well even when the website is in heavy traffic. It increases the capacity of existing servers and additional servers can be easily added. This also leads to lower costs.

Load Balancer Types

One of the curious things about the load balancer is the load balancer types. Now let's examine the load balancer types together.

1. Server Load Balancing

The purpose of server load balancing is to distribute workloads to servers based on availability and capabilities. However, routing of in-app requests is based on traffic reliance. That is, application layer traffic is used.

2. Hardware Based Load Balancing

With hardware-based load balancing, multiple load balancers can run on a single device. There is also built-in virtualization capability here.

3. Software Based Load Balancing

This type of load balancing also works with virtual machines. It is much more flexible when compared to physical load balancing. This type of load balancing works on traditional hypervisors, containers, and Linux processes. 

4. Virtual Load Balancing

This type of load balancing is also known as a combination of hardware-based and software-based load balancing types. Special load balancing occurs with the special device in the virtual machine.

5. Cloud Based Load Balancing

In this type of load balancing, cloud-based software is used. There are multiple options for load balancing here. Network load balancing, HTTP load balancing, internal load balancing are some of them. 

6. Container Load Balancing

Container load balancing that provides virtual, isolated application instances is enabled through load balancing clusters. Balancing is assisted by the Kubernetes container orchestration system.

Which Traffic Types Are Balanced With Load Balancer?

• HTTP

• HTTP(S)

• TCP

• UDP

Load Balance Usage Areas

The load balancer, which maximizes accessibility and server continuity, can be used by almost any website with high site traffic. It is especially important to use in the field of e-commerce. E-commerce websites or applications that are frequently visited on sale days use load balancers to maximize the user experience and to avoid any disruption in the flow.

The financial industry also receives support from load balancers to provide a seamless experience to its users to avoid disruptions. Social media appsand sometimes it uses load balancer to manage the traffic of millions of people well. None of the users want the website or application they visit to be unable to respond frequently. For this reason, the load balancer plays a very important role here, supporting both servers and users. It acts as a bridge and enables optimization.