In the fast-paced digital age, maximizing efficiency and performance has become crucial for businesses to thrive. With ever-evolving technologies, organizations must find effective ways to streamline processes and boost productivity. For businesses that want to optimize application availability and ensure a positive end-user experience, load balancing is essential for modern application delivery.
What is Load Balancing?
Load balancing is the process of efficiently distributing network traffic among multiple servers.
Modern applications need to handle millions of users at the same time. They need to deliver the right text, video, images, and more to each user in a quick and reliable way. To effectively meet these high volumes, modern computing best practice typically requires additional servers.
How Does Load Balancing Work?
For most companies, they run their application on multiple servers. This arrangement is also known as a server farm. To start with, user requests sent to the application will go through the load balancer. The load balancer works by controlling and distributing the traffic to a group of servers through various load balancing algorithms. A load balancer is designed to route client requests to a single server that is best suited to quickly handle those requests.
Additionally, it ensures that a single server is not overloaded to prevent performance issues. If one server goes down, then it will redirect traffic to the other online servers. When a new server is added to the server group, the load balancer automatically sends requests to that server.
The key functions that a load balancer performs are:
- Distributes client requests or network load efficiently across multiple servers
- Ensures high availability and reliability by sending requests only to online servers
- Provides the flexibility to add or remove servers depending on the demand
What are Load Balancing Algorithms?
A load balancing algorithm is the logic that a load balancer uses for distributing network traffic between servers. Simply put, it is a set of rules to determine the best server for each client request. The two main categories of load balancing algorithms are static load balancing and dynamic load balancing.
Static Load Balancing
Firstly, static load balancing algorithms are independent of the current server state, following fixed rules. Some static load algorithms will send an equal amount of traffic to each server in a group, whether it be a specific order or random. Static load balancing examples are:
- Round-robin – Distributes traffic to a list of servers in rotation using Domain Name System (DNS), which maps website names to servers. Instead of using dedicated hardware or software, an authoritative name server performs the load balancing. This is the most basic load balancing method because it uses only the name of each server to determine which one receives the next incoming request.
- Weighted round-robin – Assigns different weights to each server based on their priority or capacity. Servers with higher weights will receive more incoming application traffic from the name server.
- IP hash – Combines incoming traffic’s source and destination IP addresses by performing a mathematical computation (hashing). This method converts the client IP address to a number and is then mapped to individual servers.
Dynamic Load Balancing
Secondly, dynamic load balancing algorithms work by analyzing each server’s status and distributing traffic accordingly. Dynamic load balancing example are:
- Least connection – Verifies which servers have the least connections at any given time and forwards traffic to them. This method is done by assuming that all connections utilize about the same amount of processing power.
- Weighted least connection – Provides administrators with flexibility to configure server weights. This is based on the assumption that some servers are capable of handling more traffic than others.
- Least response time – To decide where to send the traffic, this method takes each server’s response time and compares it with the number of open connections. It sends traffic to the server with the fastest response time, guaranteeing faster service for users.
- Resource-based – Distributes traffic based on the available resources on each server at any given time. This method uses specialized software, called an agent, to run on each server and measure that server’s CPU and memory capacity. The Load Balancer also queries the agent prior to distributing traffic to that particular server.
Benefits of Load Balancing
From increased availability to security, there are a variety of benefits that load balancing provides.
- Increased Availability: Checks the health of servers before sending traffic to them. If a server is about to crash or is down for maintenance or updates, load balancing automatically reassigns traffic to a functioning server. This prevents service outages and maintains high uptime.
- Improved Performance: By increasing response time and reducing network latency, it improves application performance. Distributing the workload will ensure that no single server is handling all requests. This optimizes resource utilization.
- Enhanced Scalability: Facilitates the addition of new servers to the system. This allows it to scale horizontally, which accommodates increased traffic or demand.
- Increased Reliability: If one server fails, load balancers redirect traffic to other servers. This minimizes downtime and ensures continuous service availability.
- Improved Resource Utilization: Evenly distributes tasks to maximize the use of resources across multiple servers while preventing individual servers from being overloaded.
- Reduced Response Time: With an even distribution of requests, the response time for each request is typically reduced, leading to a more responsive and efficient system.
- Improved Fault Tolerance: Redirects traffic away from failed or underperforming servers. This helps to maintain the overall stability of the system, therefore enhancing the system’s fault tolerance.
- Increased Application Security: Includes built-in security features such as SSL encryption, WAF (Web Application Firewall) and MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication). Integrates into Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) to enhance application security. By securely routing or offloading traffic, load balancing helps protect against DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks.
Four Types of Load Balancing
There are three different categories for load balancing based on how the client requests to redirect the traffic.
- Network Load Balancer – To optimize traffic routing, network load balancers analyze IP addresses and network metadata. They monitor application traffic source and assign a single static IP address to multiple servers. In order to balance a server load, a network load balancer uses static and dynamic load balancing algorithms.
- Application Load Balancer – Complex modern applications consist of many server farms with multiple servers that are dedicated to a single application function. With application load balancers, they look at the content of the request such as HTTP headers or SSL session ID to redirect traffic accordingly.
- Global Server Balancer – Global load balancing refers to servers that are distributed across multiple geographic locations. For instance, a company may have servers in several data centers in different countries and third party cloud providers across the world. As a result, the local load balancer manages the application load within a region or zone. They attempt to direct traffic to a remote server that is geographically close to a client. In the event that there is a disaster, then they may also direct traffic to remote servers outside of the client’s geographic zone.
Mounting Equipment
To help manage your servers, we provide a wide range of server racks, server rack rails, and rack shelves that you can select from for your data center.
- Racks: Our 4 Post and 2 Post racks are an effective way to mount your equipment. Depending on your needs, we provide open frame racks, enclosed racks, and wall mount racks.

- Shelves: We provide rack shelves that come in different sizes and configurations to serve a wide variety of needs. To store your servers on the rack, you can choose between our fixed shelf or sliding shelf.

- Rails: Server rack rails are a great way to mount your servers in a 4 post or 2 post rack.

We provide a large selection of rails, rail kits, and universal rails.
FAQs: Load Balancing
What are the types of load balancing technology?
Load balancers are either a hardware load balancer or software load balancer. Hardware load balancers process and redirect gigabytes of traffic to hundreds of different servers. It can be stored in data centers and use virtualization to create multiple digital or virtual load balancers that you can centrally manage. Software load balancers perform all load balancing functions. They can be installed on any server or accessed as a managed third party service.