The Advantages of LBaaS against DIY Load Balancing
Load-balancing-as-a-service, or LBaaS, can have significant impacts on various attributes of your network. When an unprecedented spike in traffic occurs to a website, there is a need to balance it, and that’s where this service comes in. Let’s now take a deep dive into why LBaaS is preferable to DIY, installable software load balancers.
Software Load Balancers
There are different ways to implement load balancing. The two major categories are hardware load balancing and software load balancing. Here, we will be focusing on software load balancing and the options that come within. Again, there are two major categories here — LBaaS and Installable Load Balancing. The names give away the meaning, but in LBaaS, a provider offers the service, and you receive it; in installable, it’s more of a do-it-yourself situation. Here’s why LBaaS is more preferable for organizations.
Why LBaaS over DIY Load Balancing?
One of the major benefits of LBaaS is that it is a fully managed service, contrary to DIY Load Balancing. This means that the users are not responsible for the programming, operation, and maintenance of the actual load balancers. The service provider is responsible for those aspects. With DIY installable load balancing, the user is responsible for everything from purchasing to configuring and monitoring to maintaining everything. Unless the user has an expert team and resources, setting up everything can prove to be a tedious, all-consuming experience.
Another advantage of LBaaS is that employing the resources of a provider can result in improved scalability. It will also, in turn, reduce overall costs for the user. A cloud provider can use scalability as a means of reducing costs. When the user opts for DIY load balancing, they have to make do with the infrastructure they have, and any upscaling comes with higher costs. If the user doesn’t use all of the resources set up, then that’s wastage. Hence, LBaaS is a better solution.
Increased performance is yet another advantage of LBaaS. With the resources of the provider, the speed and availability of the cloud can be optimized. The resulting increase in performance can be about 90%. Since LBaaS is part of open source infrastructure, the risk of vendor lock-in is also reduced. With DIY installers, the user is committed to the physical infrastructure of load balancing and related licensing, etc.
Ultimately, choosing a DIY load balancing structure or an LBaaS provider is in the user’s hands, according to their business requirements and resources. With an LBaaS expert such as VEXXHOST, most of the hassle of managing a complex infrastructure is offset. LBaaS also comes with the added benefits of better performance, cost reduction, and unnecessary commitments or vendor lock-ins. Learn more about VEXXHOST’s load balancing service or check out the cloud offerings, including highly secure private clouds.
