By James Rago
As more consumers and businesses depend on online applications to manage fluctuating traffic, the demand for flawless service experiences has never been higher. This is especially critical for ticketing and video streaming services, where any disruption can lead to significant dissatisfaction.
The infrastructure supporting these services is often distributed across both cloud and on-premises environments. To handle unpredictable demand, automated flexibility and backend scaling are essential to maintain a satisfactory user experience.
Streaming services, on the other hand, manage traffic across hundreds of servers to enable seamless media delivery. A load balancer acts as a traffic controller, providing exceptional performance and scalability for both on-premises and cloud application deployments.
How load balancers protect user experience
Load balancers work by managing and distributing legitimate traffic to application servers ready to handle the load. Unexpected spikes in traffic and malicious threat actors can cause chaos on the ability to deliver a good user experience. A common issue that many ticketing websites can encounter include server overload, which causes the performance to be degraded. These can be mitigated by implementing continuous monitoring of the server’s performance, auto-scaling of additional servers and increasing the resources allocated on the servers automatically through policy controls.
Load balancer deployment options
The options include hardware-based, software-based, and cloud-based load balancers. Whilst they have different features and applications, all work to enhance application responsiveness, improve scalability, minimise downtime, and help create a better user experience.
- Hardware-based load balancers offer outstanding dedicated performance and scalability, making them ideal for stable high traffic environments. They provide dedicated hardware resources to help ensure resources are available. Security conscious environments often mandate a physical and dedicated load balancer.
- Software-based load balancers can also handle large traffic volumes and often offer more flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Virtual Load balancers fit the need for flexibility and scaling within an on-premises environment.
- Cloud-based load balancers can be deployed across multiple cloud computing resources to enable resiliency. They have become popular for their ease of deployment, high scalability and opportunity to reduce operational costs. However, costs for bandwidth and storage can also quickly escalate with cloud-native load balancers and decision-makers should be mindful of the risk of vendor lock-in.
Key considerations for choosing a load balancing solution
The ideal load balancing solution should be versatile enough to meet various deployment scenarios, whether for on-premises, cloud-based or hybrid cloud deployments. To foster optimal performance, high-capacity traffic and low-latency processing will drive your primary requirements. Additionally, the product should be easy to use. Your administrators should be able to understand and use the product without requiring in-depth experience. For when you need expert assistance, make sure you evaluate the vendor support experience.
Security should always be a top priority for any part of your network. The solution should include robust security features such as a Web Application Firewall (WAF), SSL offloading, and Zero-Trust policy enforcement capabilities.
Automation capabilities should be carefully considered to make sure the technology stack can support an automated lifecycle. Features to focus on include a RESTful API, CI/CD integrations, and certificate automation.
Best practices for a resilient load-balancing implementation
To optimise the capabilities of a load balancing solution, deployment design and ongoing systems, administration should focus on these actions:
- Assess the need: firstly it’s important to analyse traffic patterns, predicted loads, and critical applications. This will determine the optimal sizing and configuration requirements.
- Monitor performance: it’s essential to address potential issues before they cause downtime or performance bottlenecks. Administrators must continuously monitor performance metrics and regularly test failover setups to confirm they are working as expected during an unplanned outage.
- Maximise redundancy and security: implementing failover mechanisms and security best practices will maximise availability and security protection. Using redundant load balancers in a high availability (HA) configuration can help ensure that each workload is protected by a local failover mechanism. Confirming that other critical infrastructure aspects, such as servers and network devices, are properly deployed in a resilient format is recommended. If one component fails, redundancy maintains uptime and availability. Implementing multiple load balancers (hardware or software) in a failover configuration is one use case; be sure to investigate geographical load balancing features to load balance site to site traffic and enable resiliency at a global level.
While load balancers can provide a boost in network security, there are some additional security measures recommended for load balancers. This should include deploying additional application security components such as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) /SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption, which will help secure communication over the Internet or a computer network between the load balancers, servers, and websites/applications. To meet the needs of traffic demanding environments such as ticketing services and streaming websites, a load balancing solution should offer consistent performance and scalability while being secure. In doing so, it will support user demand and foster brand enhancing – rather than damaging – digital experiences.
The author
James Rago, Product Manager, Principal, Progress
