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Load balancing is a crucial aspect of application delivery infrastructure. It provides users a positive application experience by optimizing resource usage, traffic throughput and service availability. As application deployment models increasingly shift to hybrid or pure cloud, load balancing remains essential. Equally important is maintaining load balancers in your environment that are working as expected and delivering the best application experience for users.
Progress LoadMaster 360, a managed application delivery and security solution, provides organizations of all sizes with the controls and insights necessary to confirm that applications are performing as expected and delivering the best possible user experience.
Basics of Load Balancing Techniques and Algorithms
Imagine you’re at a grocery store during the evening rush hour. As more shoppers arrive, the checkout lines grow longer and the wait times increase. To alleviate this issue, the store opens additional checkouts, distributing customers evenly among the available cashiers or self-service tills. This means no single line becomes too long and shoppers can quickly complete their purchases.
In IT infrastructure, load balancing performs a similar function. Like a grocery store, which manages the flow of customers by controlling the number of checkouts available as demand fluctuates, load balancers manage the flow of network traffic to application servers as needs change.
What is Load Balancing?
Load balancing is a technique for distributing incoming network traffic across a group of servers, known as a server pool. The goal is to optimize resource usage, maximize throughput, minimize response time and avoid overloading any single server. By evenly distributing the workload, no single server becomes a bottleneck and it improves overall performance and reliability.
How Does Load Balancing Work?
Load balancers sit between client devices and applications in the server pool. When a client sends a request, the load balancer receives it and decides which server is best suited to handle it based on factors such as server capacity, current load and pre-defined rules.
When making these decisions, load balancers use intelligent algorithms that consider parameters such as the number of active connections, CPU and memory usage and response time. By constantly monitoring each server’s health and status, load balancers can detect issues and route traffic away from servers that are offline or experiencing problems.
Handling Server Issues
Let’s revisit the grocery store analogy. If someone drops a jar of tomato juice at one of the checkouts, that particular lane will be temporarily closed for cleaning. Customers waiting in that line will be redirected to other available checkouts, which creates a smoother flow of customer checkout activity.
Similarly, if a server in an application pool becomes unavailable due to maintenance or failure, the load balancers will automatically redirect new access requests and traffic to other servers capable of handling the requests. Meaning that applications remain accessible to users, even when individual servers have issues.
Advanced Load Balancing Strategies for Diverse Environments
LoadMaster supports more advanced algorithms, such as weighted round-robin and weighted least connections. These allow administrators to prioritize servers based on their capacity or performance, providing a larger share of incoming requests to the most powerful servers.
Additionally, LoadMaster offers agent-based adaptive load balancing, which uses real-time server health information to make intelligent traffic distribution decisions. This technique helps prevent overloading servers that may be experiencing performance issues or have reached their capacity limits.
Furthermore, LoadMaster supports content-based routing, enabling the load balancer to direct requests to specific servers based on the content of the request, such as URL, host headers or cookies. This feature is particularly useful for applications requiring specialized processing or specific server requirements based on the requested data type, such as routing video streaming requests to servers optimized for serving videos.
Many organizations operate IT infrastructures spanning on-premises data centers, public clouds and hybrid environments. As a result, their load-balancing needs and deployments can vary significantly, requiring tailored strategies to deliver optimal application performance and availability. Complex network topology or distributed application deployments, over cloud or on-premises data centers, shouldn’t compromise application experience.
Adapting to these diverse environments necessitates a flexible and in-depth load-balancing solution that can accommodate each organization’s specific requirements. This may involve deploying load balancers in different locations, configuring them to work with various application types and integrating them with existing infrastructure.
It’s well known that any systems management overhead increases in proportion to its complexity. The same applies to complex distributed application server infrastructure and the load balancers mediating access. To address this challenge, organizations need a load-balancing solution that simplifies the management of diverse deployments without imposing unworkable overheads on IT staff. This is where LoadMaster 360 shines.
Designed for modern, heterogeneous IT environments, LoadMaster 360 streamlines the management of load balancers across various platforms and locations. It empowers organizations to manage their unique load-balancing strategies efficiently while delivering optimal application performance and availability.
Achieving 360 Visibility with LoadMaster 360: Monitoring, Analytics and Reporting Tools
LoadMaster 360 is a cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution designed to simplify managing and monitoring LoadMaster load balancers across diverse environments. By providing a centralized, user-friendly interface, LoadMaster 360 empowers organizations to gain complete visibility into their application delivery infrastructure, enabling optimal performance, availability and security.
One of the key features of LoadMaster 360 is its ability to manage LoadMaster instances across multiple sites and platforms, including on-premise data centers, public clouds and hybrid environments. Through secure connectors, LoadMaster 360 enables administrators to centrally configure, monitor and control their load balancers, reducing the need to switch between different management tools and reducing the complexity of maintaining an application delivery infrastructure.
LoadMaster 360 offers a single-pane-of-glass experience, providing contextualized insights and analytics that help application, network and security teams collaborate effectively to maintain application performance and resolve issues promptly. The intuitive user interface provides insights into application performance, capacity utilization, infrastructure health, security posture, licensing and user experience. The image below, Figure 1, highlights the core features of LoadMaster 360.
Figure 1: LoadMaster 360 features and functionality.
By leveraging these thorough monitoring and analytics capabilities, LoadMaster 360 enables organizations to identify and address potential issues before they impact end-user productivity. Real-time alerts notify administrators of performance degradation, security threats or capacity constraints, allowing them to take immediate action to maintain optimal application delivery.
LoadMaster 360 also offers advanced load balancing features such as pre-authentication and enhanced security via the web application firewall (WAF) from LoadMaster. The security features help organizations protect their applications from various threats, including DDoS attacks, SQL injection and cross-site scripting. With LoadMaster 360, administrators can use a single interface to manage application delivery performance, security and configuration in relation to your LoadMaster workloads.
In addition to its robust monitoring and management capabilities, LoadMaster 360 offers flexible licensing options that enable organizations to scale their load-balancing infrastructure based on changing business requirements. It supports license pooling and on-demand provisioning, allowing administrators to allocate and manage LoadMaster licenses across different environments.
Furthermore, LoadMaster 360 provides intelligent analytics and reporting tools that help organizations gain valuable insights into their application delivery performance, user experience and infrastructure utilization.
LoadMaster 360 revolutionizes the way organizations manage and monitor diverse load-balancing infrastructure. LoadMaster 360 empowers administrators to deliver an optimal application experience while minimizing management overhead and complexity by providing a centralized, user-friendly platform with extensive visibility, advanced security features and flexible licensing options.
On-Demand Webinar - LoadMaster 360: Successfully Managing Your LoadMaster Fleet
We recently delivered a half-hour webinar that provided an overview of LoadMaster 360 and covered the following topics:
- What is LoadMaster 360?
- How can it be used?
- What are its features and benefits?
- LoadMaster 360 Demo
- Coming Soon with LoadMaster 360
You can watch a recording of the webinar via the embedded video below.
Real-World Use Cases and Case Studies
Each organization has a unique load balancer deployment tailored to its particular needs. As a result, each organization will have a different use case for load balancer management solutions such as LoadMaster 360. A common factor will be the need for a management solution to achieve the best load balancing and user AX. Here are some typical use cases that the deployment of LoadMaster 360 would help with.
Managing Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Application Delivery - LoadMaster 360 streamlines the management of LoadMaster instances across on-premises and cloud platforms, providing a unified interface for configuration and management.
Incident Management - LoadMaster 360 offers in-context analysis and guidance to help identify and resolve application delivery issues quickly, reducing the mean time to resolution.
Certificate Management - LoadMaster 360 allows organizations to monitor all server security certificates and alert them to upcoming expiration dates, helping to prevent outages due to expired certificates and the associated application downtime. We should note that LoadMaster load balancers also directly support the auto-renewal of certificates from certificate authorities that support this. However, some don’t, and LoadMaster 360 certificate expiry alerting can help prevent downtime because of the expiration of one of those certificates.
Licensing and Capacity Management - LoadMaster 360 supports pooled licensing, allowing organizations to maximize their license use as they scale their application delivery infrastructure on demand by controlling and monitoring current license use.
Security and Enhanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) – With LoadMaster 360, users can monitor aspects of their application security, such as successful authentications, active and failed Single Sign-on (SSO) sessions and actively blocked users. Users of the LoadMaster WAF can gain security insights, minimize the time required for WAF configuration and tuning and reduce the occurrence of false positive alerts, all within LoadMaster 360.
Future Trends and Advancements in Load Balancing
The uptake and use of web-based applications will only accelerate in the foreseeable future. As a result, the need for load balancers to deliver uptime and performance will also increase. This means there will be more load balancers to manage, and LoadMaster is well-positioned to address this growing need.
However, we need to work smarter rather than harder in the load balancer space. So, how will the load-balancing sector change over the next few years?
One key trend in load balancing is the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies. By analyzing vast amounts of data on application performance, user behavior and infrastructure health, load balancers and supporting management infrastructure solutions will be able to optimize traffic distribution proactively, predict potential issues and provide actionable insights to administrators.
Application security will also drive advancements in load balancers. As cyberthreats evolve and become more sophisticated, load balancers will gain additional security features to provide even more comprehensive protection against emerging threats. This may include enhancements to WAF capabilities, advanced bot management and further integration with leading security information and event management (SIEM) solutions.
Further advances in multi-cloud, hybrid, edge and on-premises load balancing will occur as technologies evolve and organizational needs adapt. Progress will be at the forefront of these changing landscapes so that the LoadMaster family of products delivers what our customers need.
Lastly, the future of load balancing and its management will likely see growth in the importance of automation and DevSecOps workflow integration. The evolution of more robust APIs and integrations with popular infrastructure-as-code tools will enable organizations to embed load-balancing configurations into their continuous integration and deployment pipelines. This will allow for faster, more reliable application deployments and updates while minimizing human error risk.
Progress Kemp LoadMaster is well-positioned to embrace future trends and advancements in load balancing and management. By applying emerging technologies, enhancing security features, adapting to multi-cloud and edge computing environments and supporting automation and DevSecOps practices, LoadMaster will continue to empower organizations to have optimal application experiences in the face of ever-changing challenges.
Try LoadMaster and LoadMaster 360 for Yourself
Visit the LoadMaster overview page for details of the current LoadMaster release and the LoadMaster 360 page for more information on our industry-leading load balancer management solution. Don't hesitate to contact us if you’d like to speak with an expert about how the LoadMaster family of products can help improve your application experience.
For a free trial of LoadMaster to see how it can improve your organization’s application delivery experience, visit our free trial page. Our support team can assist during your free trial testing. Use the contact page to start a conversation with the support team. You can also request a live demo of LoadMaster 360.
