3 things you should know about load balancers
99.9% uptime for a website/app is a necessity.
There’s a silent hero for making this possible.
Here’s the 3 things you should know about load balancers.
Real World Comparison
You’ve been in a grocery store with 1 open register.
There’s a manager watching to see if the line backs up.
The manager sees it and sends cashiers to open more.
Then the line is gone.
The same thing happens in the business networking world.
Load Balancing
What the manager is doing is called load balancing. On a network, there’s a server installed called a load balancer. This load balancer does the same thing as the manager. It sends the traffic to an unused server.
How it works
When the app/website server is created it is duplicated.
The load balancer is told which servers are associated with the app.
Traffic flows to the load balancer, it checks to see which server is most used.
It sends the traffic to the least used server.
The setup
There has to be at least 2 identical app/website servers. After 2 servers, you can add more to handle the traffic.
This is how you get websites with 99.9% uptime.
You may hear this called resiliency.
And it’s been around since the 90s.