What is Multi-Location Load Balancing?
Multi-Location Load Balancing, also known as Global Server Load Balancer (GSLB), refers to the distribution of client traffic across a pool of end-points that reside in multiple different environments/locations. The days of single-site deployments are gone, and it is essential to monitor, audit, and distribute traffic to other geolocation end-points, without any manual interference.
Multi-location load balancing is implemented at the DNS level. The DNS query results are handled dynamically by the load balancer to direct clients to the geographical server or load balancing end-point that best fits their requirements. This reduces the content delivery time (connection latency) to clients, improves user interactivity and experience with web services.
Multi-site load balancing preserves business continuity when there is a sudden server failure or service disruption. Multi-site load balancing redirects traffic to the nearest server not affected by the loss. Various predefined policies are used to distribute traffic between multiple location end-points, like turn-based, weighted or persistent routing, to name a few. Health monitors are used to ensure that the traffic is only sent to healthy backend servers by taking the wrong server/location out of the load-balancing pool.
The multi-location setup can consist of server locations, be it cloud-providers or on-premise solutions.