What is Cloud Load Balancing?

Flexible loading balancing is one of the reasons why people choose a cloud service to host their websites or applications. This feature is the process of distributing server resources and workloads in a cloud server’s environment. Compared with traditional load balancing solutions, cloud load balancing have more advantages. For example, easy to scale, and lower cost. It improves service availability and helps prevent downtimes in cloud environments. In this article, we will explain more so that you know why a cloud service is suitable for you.

What is cloud loading balancing?

Cloud load balancing, unlike hardware loading balancing, is a software-based load balancing service. The service distributes traffic between multiple cloud servers to manage massive workloads. That enables all servers not to become overwhelmed, and then decreases latency and avoids downtime.

When ordering a cloud server service, many people will rent loading balancing services based on their needs. That is because route traffic themselves is a difficult and complex job.

In this situation, the conception of “load balancing-as-a-service” (LBaaS) generates.

How does cloud load balancing work?

When you implement Load balancing successfully, the servers in a cloud will share workload. That optimizes cloud applications’ performance.

A load balancer may evaluate server load or geographical distance, and then decide where to direct traffic. When a server goes offline, the load balancer redirects incoming traffic to another available server in a specified data center. This process is called failover.

Different from a single load balancer, Cloud-based load balancing, or LBaaS, balances workloads across servers in a cloud environment. As there are different cloud server environment types, LBaaS can distribute traffic among multiple cloud providers or multiple data centers.

Benefits of Cloud Load Balancing as a Service (LBaaS)

There are several benefits from load balancing-as-a-service:

Scalability: When traffics is heavy, users will not need to manually configure physical loading balancing. The LBaaS will automatically scale users’ resources and avoid heavy resources being occupied on a single server.

Reduced costs: Compared to hardware loading balancer, LBaaS, as a software-defined service, is usually less costly and demands less effort, and time.

Availability: When a server is down, a user’s resources connects to another server. That makes sure user service’s high availability and minimizes latency.

Cloud Load Balancing Techniques

As we stated previously, cloud server load balancing is important and keeps cloud service’s high performance. This feature helps avoid possible data disasters and destruction. It is because data can be moved to another healthy server when an accident occurs. But how does cloud server load balancing act and what are its algorithms? Here we will explain some related techniques:

Seamless Auto-scaling

When the requests of a server or a cloud application in a cloud deployment decrease, the load balancing will auto-scale the server or applications’ resource consumption. That makes the whole cloud environment save unnecessary resources.

To enable this feature, cloud service providers must define an auto-scaling policy and the detected load limitation when setting up the cloud environment. Then, the cloud DNS load balancer will allow the auto scaler to scale to the detected load.

Support for Multiple Protocols

Cloud load balancing software supports many protocols, including TCP, HTTP/2, and UDP load balancing, because it is specifically curated to serve cloud applications.

Active Health Checks

The periodic health checks feature of cloud DNS load balancers will automatically monitor the upstream servers’ health. To do this, the cloud load balancer sends health check requests to every server in the cloud environment and works based on the response of servers.

High Performance

To make sure every server’s high performance in one cloud environment, the load balancing service will ensure the workload distribution in real-time.

Why is load balancing necessary for a cloud service?

Load balancing is an essential service for applications hosted in a cloud environment. Just like common servers in data centers, a cloud server will also encounter high resource usage when cloud applications’ requests or traffics increase much. These high resources occupy will cause application, website, and server latency, even server down. That means your business customers, the end user, may be disconnected from your cloud services. It is a serious and unallowable issue for most businesses. In this situation, load balancing can avoid this issue as much as possible.

Some data centers have hardware load balancing for servers as well. However, compared with cloud load balancing, hardware load balancing is very inefficient at traffic management. In most cases, hardware load balancing needs IT technicians to manage and adjust.

In the cloud environment, load balancers are based on software. That makes them more suitable for cloud-hosted applications and infrastructure in any location. If you want to try a cloud service with this load balancing, CloudClusters will be a good choice.

What is cloud loading balancing?

How does cloud load balancing work?

Benefits of Cloud Load Balancing as a Service (LBaaS)