How Do Layer-4 Load Balancers Scale Up Resources to Improve Business Performance?
The ever-growing popularity of cloud computing technology is largely due to the fact that it dynamically scales up resources to answer varying demands efficiently. There are three important factors in a business process that needs to be scaled up: The cloud computing system must provide solutions to replication, load balancing, and location mobility to applications.
Virtualization is one of the important aspects of cloud computing technologies. However, virtualization does not solve load balancing. There are different aspects of load balancing (like scaling up name space, session, logic, and transport) that needs to be efficiently addressed. Whether your business handles large volumes of traffic or runs web-based applications and games, load balancing is vital in handling traffic surges. This is where the Layer-4 Load Balancer comes to your rescue.
Load balancing challenges
Load balancers enhance the capacity of applications in both user limit and performance. Acting as reverse proxies, load balancers distribute traffic among different servers in the network. In a conventional network infrastructure, the focus is always on the lower layers of the OSI model. Conventional methods are used to design and host applications. In this setup, user customization and modifications cannot be dynamically handled. In a cloud-based setup, all layers are re-organized to facilitate dynamic updates.
The cloud computing setup emphasizes the need to pull out business intelligence from meta data while integrating the infrastructure at higher layers. For instance, the Layer-4 Load Balancer operates at the transport layer and intuitively handles changing traffic trends. In other words, a VDI environment is created with multiple servers sharing the same IP address. Traffic is shared among these servers. The Layer-4 Load Balancer distributes traffic among different servers based on various aspects. The number of sessions managed by each server is taken into consideration. Traffic is directed to the least busy server to facilitate the fastest response time. The Layer-4 Load Balancer identifies demand for critical resources and scales up load balancing factors like name space, transport, identity and logic. While resources are scaled, higher levels of SLA are met.
How do Layer-4 Load Balancers impact your business?
Layer-4 Load Balancers offer more throughput than Layer-7 load balancers. By properly configuring a Layer-4 Load Balancer, you can squeeze higher levels of gigabyte throughput from low end servers too. The striking feature of load balancing is that resources are scaled according to assigned SLAs. Configuring your load balancer setup is simple and easy. For instance: GMO Cloud offers a highly intuitive web-based API that enables you to provision load balancers quickly. Sudden surges of traffic are effectively handled by dispersing requests to multiple virtual machines. In case one VM fails, traffic can be routed to other VMs in the network. While resources are scaled up, fault tolerance is minimized.
In a cloud-based network, traffic trends are different. The majority of traffic is intra-cloud. Moreover, network infrastructure is taking a major revamp. In such conditions, it is important to adapt to changing technologies to stay ahead in the competition. Joining the cloud computing community is the right choice to achieve more production and performance.
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About the Guest Author:
Kaushik Das is an engineer, research analyst and a technical writer in the areas wireless, IT, enterprise software, next-generation hosting, storage and renewable energy. He specializes in competitive analysis, market research, industry insights, white paper and actionable web content development.
