Most of the time, clients who wish to deploy their solutions to Azure in hybrid or cloud-only environments will need to choose between the built-in load balancing feature of Azure or a third-party solution available via the Azure Marketplace.
Thankfully, KEMP has an advanced, integrated ADC (Application Delivery Controller) called LoadMaster. LoadMaster provides a number of solutions for optimizing and securing workloads that are based in the cloud.
It comes with a number of features, the benefits of which we will be highlighting throughout this article. Read on for more.
A Breakdown of Load Balancing
Modern websites with high rates of traffic need to serve millions of requests simultaneously from clients or users, and need to be able to return the appropriate images, text, application data, or videos in a manner that is reliable and fast.
If a website wants to be able to meet these needs in a way that is cost-effective, then they will need to add more servers.
Load balancers act as a kind of “traffic officer”. It sits at the front of the website’s servers and routes client requests over all of the servers that are able to fulfill those requests.
It does this in a way that maximizes the capacity and speed and makes sure that no server is overworked, resulting in a loss of performance.
Different Load Balancing Algorithms
There are different algorithms for load balancing, and each algorithm comes with its own benefits. The choice of your method for load balancing will depend on your needs.
Hash – Distributes requests using a key that is defined by the user, like the request URL or the client IP address, for example. NGINX Plus is also able to apply a hash that consistently reduces redistribution of loads if the upstream of the servers, which is set, changes.
Round Robin – Requests will be distributed throughout the entire group of servers in a sequence.
Least Time – Requests will be sent to the server that are chosen using a formula that uses a combination of the least active connections and the fastest response time. NGINX Plus is exclusive.
Least Connections – A new request will be sent to the server that currently has the fewest connections to clients. The computing capacity for each server will be accounted for when determining which server has the fewest connections.
IP Hash – The client’s IP address will be used to decide which server will receive their request.
Click here to learn more about the different load balancing algorithms.
KEMP LoadMaster Benefits
The KEMP LoadMaster ESP (Edge Security Pack) offers your website a number of security features, like single sign-in, being able to assign permitted groups, as well as pre-authentication. Additionally, you can configure ESP to allow certain virtual directories and URLs to be published via LoadMaster.
Thanks to the introduction of the Azure Active Directory Domain Services, you can extend AD into your virtual network, which will allow LoadMaster to directly authenticate users. Doing this will help you provide seamless application access and single sign-in for several apps published with LoadMaster.
This service offers you on-premises, familiar delivery functionality for your applications in the cloud.
If you are looking for Layer 7 ADC functionality that is more advanced for your apps, then you will find that the LoadMaster can be deployed effortlessly while also giving you app health checks that are advanced, an algorithm list that is comprehensive, hosting for multiple tenants, and high availability.
If you decide to use the LoadMaster in combination with some of KEMP’s other advanced offers, like their KEMP360 Central, you can also receive the benefit of having control that is centralized for your deployments of LoadMaster, which will ensure that all of your most important applications are always available.
Summary
As you can see, there are a number of benefits to using a LoadMaster, especially if you have a popular website that receives a lot of traffic.
We hope that you found this article more informative, and we encourage you to give the KEMP LoadMaster a try for all of your load balancing needs.
if you would like to find out bout packet switching, click here.