Empowering Your Developers with the an Agnostic Load Balancer
Today’s websites handle a tremendous amount of traffic each day. At any given time, a website might have hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of simultaneous requests coming in. The website’s job is to accurately send back the text, data, images, etc. that the website’s user needs to see — all within a moment.
Obviously, a large website must be equipped to handle the enormous number of requests and traffic coming into the site. Load balancers are a valuable tool to help with this task.
Load balancing is a means of distributing incoming network traffic across many backend servers. This group of servers can be called a “server farm” or a “server pool”. By splitting the traffic amongst many servers, the traffic can be handled more smoothly and efficiently. Load balancing is a relatively easy and affordable way for a large scale website to fulfill a very high number of incoming requests.
How Does a Load Balancer Work?
The easiest way to describe the work of a load balancer is to compare it to someone directing heavy traffic. Using algorithms, the load balancer takes all of the requests coming into a group of servers and directs them in an orderly fashion to the individual servers to be processed efficiently. The load balancer’s job is to ensure that no one server becomes overwhelmed by too much traffic, thus leading to a slow or poor performance. If one server is overloaded, the load balancer routes the traffic to a different server. When a new server is added to a group, it rebalances the traffic for even distribution with the new number of servers.
Hardware vs. Software Load Balancing: Which is Better?
There are two general types of load balancing systems: hardware and software.
Hardware-based load balancers are work on hardware sold to by vendors. The hardware vendors load a proprietary software onto the hardware machine, and the software uses special processors to facilitate the process. As the traffic load gets higher, new, larger hardware machines are needed.
Software-based solutions don’t require special hardware, and are much more affordable and flexible. In fact, many software solutions exist in the cloud.
What is an Agnostic Software Load Balancer?
Before we can learn what an agnostic software load balancer is, we must first learn what makes a software program agnostic. An agnostic program is very compatible and able to integrate very easily across may types of platforms. The benefit of an agnostic software program is that it allows companies to easily apply a software of all of its platforms without making any major changes to hardware, machines or operating systems. In other words, everything is compatible without added adjustments, customizations, time or expense.
The reasons for a company to use agnostic software are clear. And using an agnostic load balancing solution is a no-brainer. NGINX uses powerful, flexible load balancing software that is fully agnostic, meaning that it doesn’t run into many problems. NGINX’s load balancer software offers almost 100% uptime, frontend and backend function flexibility, superior traffic control, server farm customization and the ability to constantly monitor server function.
To learn more about NGINX’s agnostic software load balancing solutions, contact us today to start your free trial.
