Articles : Load Balancing

The most significant difference in software development today compared to the past is the rate of deployments: development teams release software to production earlier and more frequently. Customers want more, and they want it now. However, they are quick to leave you for the competition when things go wrong. According to research, 32% of all customers would desert a company they liked after one bad experience.

What is a load balancer? What does a web application firewall (WAF) do? What about global server load balancing (GSLB) and web acceleration? These technologies are fundamental to modern application delivery, bringing high availability, security, and scalability. But have you ever had to explain them to a normal person?

A centralized control plane for application delivery allows you to use a single platform for all of your application delivery needs. It unites teams involved in the application lifecycle who are usually dispersed across many systems and platforms, with improvements in between. Application Development teams are empowered to deploy applications on their own, with a self-service approach. Platform operations (NetOps, SecOps, Site Reliability, etc.) can set highways not roadblocks, ensuring compliance with corporate security standards without stifling the velocity of development and deployment.

More organizations are using containers as a mechanism for driving their cloud-native applications. Some organizations have hundreds of small containers across many different servers in different development, test, and production environments. This can be tricky to manage, which is why companies have turned to Kubernetes for container orchestration. 

We use a variety of tools and ADCs to balance the load of our software applications around the world. We have learned to rely on them immensely to ensure that our applications stay online and are able to scale and respond to changing needs. However, few people understand how load balancers work to ensure the availability of our critical applications and services.

Load balancing is a crucial practice for any organization that needs to prioritize scalability and performance. By efficiently distributing network and application traffic across multiple servers, load balancing helps ensure that you can continue providing services to customers while gracefully handling unexpected spikes inactivity.

If you are running Microsoft’s Network Load Balancer, then you are aware that the product is facing End Of Life (EOL). This EOL situation means you need to identify and compare the best Microsoft Network Load Balancer alternatives. Anytime you are forced to change your networking infrastructure due to an EOL, it’s a great time to consider how to upgrade your capabilities in the process. This post will help you to identify a replacement load balancer suitable for Windows infrastructure and compatible with a Hyper-V hypervisor, with a framework for making this decision.

The pandemic forced rapid scale-up and highlighted design decisions as critical to building an adaptive business. With the global economy suffering the consequences of COVID-19 and national lockdowns, there has been a large focus on cutting costs, reducing staff and stripping back to the bare necessities. In the land of application delivery and cloud computing, the reverse has happened. Companies rushed to provision more capacity in response to sustained increases in traffic and usage driven by the move from offline to online for so many activities.  

Developers building business-critical applications need an IT environment that allows them to work quickly and securely. This means having reliable web servers that are always available and protected. However, in the agile world of modern application development, they can’t always wait for the IT team to set up and configure load balancers and ADCs for them. They need their own solutions, and they need them to be tailored to their own needs. When we developed Snapt Nova, we were our first customer. Our development team uses Nova themselves (the process known as "dogfooding") to provide load balancing for Nova development and deployment. This post is about what developers need, how the right load balancer or application delivery controller (ADC) can support and empower developers, and why Nova might be the best load balancer for developers – or, at least, why our own developers seem to think it is.