Articles : Load Balancing (2)

If you’re running your applications in Amazon Web Services / EC2, you need some load balancing to make sure your web servers don’t get overloaded. Amazon offers Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) natively, but is it the best option for you? This blog explains the differences between Amazon ELB and Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs). If you only need a basic load balancer to manage where to send and receive traffic within your AWS environment, then ELB might be enough. But if you’re running business-critical applications and you need to make sure they are always available, are running as fast as possible, are protected from attacks, and display real-time telemetry and performance data, then you might need additional functionality that ELB cannot provide. You might require a complete ADC like Snapt Aria, which provides a full-featured, high-performance software load balancer, web accelerator, WAF and GSLB.

The load balancer market is evolving from feature-heavy hardware appliances to lightweight software solutions and flexible cloud-native implementations. But if you’re evaluating load balancer options, how do you bridge the gap between old world systems and the new? Do you prioritize the product features you’ve come to rely on or the advantages of flexibility? What are the pros and cons?

Containers are rapidly becoming the go-to software tool for application developers, and Docker is one of the most-loved container platforms according to the latest Stack Overflow developer survey. Docker simplifies software development so that developers can build applications that are lightweight, easily scalable and can run on any infrastructure. But when it comes to management and orchestration, the platform needs to be augmented with modern load balancing to ensure that business-critical applications are always up, fast and secure.

The rise of DevOps engineers has changed how IT teams monitor the health of their systems and networks. Rather than having a siloed organization with specialized staff managing specific pieces of equipment, a DevOps team comprises tech generalists who take a more holistic view of the system and prioritize application performance. They need a different set of metrics, along with notifications and alerts, to analyze how business-critical applications are performing. This blog highlights five key metrics for optimizing application performance. 

In this blog we look at Red Hat, one of the market’s innovative enterprise Linux OS providers, and how Snapt’s standalone ADC solution, Snapt Aria, meets the needs of Red Hat deployments.   

If you’re running your business applications in containers and managing those with Kubernetes, you’re probably aware of the limitations of traditional Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) and Load Balancers in this environment. Traditional load balancers simply do not have the scalability and agility needed for cloud native deployments. Whether you’re already up and running in containers or just getting started, this blog will tell you all you need to know for choosing the best load balancer for Kubernetes.

If you're considering whether you can afford running more than one server for your business, you're likely to discover that you can't afford not to. Even with the additional operational expenses, you’ll be better off having redundant servers because redundancy minimizes downtime for your critical applications and reduces the costs incurred by outages, which can be huge. The price of downtime is always too high for any business. Like it or not, IT downtime is a fact of life. Systems fail. Outages happen. The failure rate of cloud servers is roughly 2% annually, for example. The larger the installation, the more frequently outages will occur. The best way to deal with these inevitable worst-case scenarios is to be prepared and minimize the downtime as much as possible.

Today’s workforce is increasingly mobile and remote, as many of us can now work effectively outside our traditional offices thanks to broadband connectivity, advances in networking technology and more capable mobile devices. Remote working not only increases employee productivity but also makes for happier employees who don’t have to contend with the stresses of commuting and can more easily balance work and life commitments. Companies that offer remote working are also more attractive to talented job seekers. But businesses need to be smart about how they support remote access to internal servers in order to minimize costs, prevent network downtime and provide secure connections.

Increased traffic on your website is a good sign that your business is doing well. It indicates that you’re getting more visitors and potential new customers to your site, selling more products or services and generating better engagement with your brand and business. But sometimes your site can experience a spike in traffic that will overload your web server, and even bring down your site, if you’re not prepared. Snapt has just published a helpful e-book on “How to Survive a Traffic Surge” that explains how surges are caused, the consequences for your business and the solutions for protecting your website.