Load Balancers

A "load balancer," or "load balancing," is a network device or software commonly used to optimize traffic or workload in a network. Here are its basic functions:

Traffic Distribution: Load balancers balance the network traffic by distributing incoming requests across multiple servers, thus evenly sharing the workload among servers and preventing any single server from being overloaded.

Redundancy and High Availability: Load balancers provide redundancy and high availability by directing traffic to alternative servers or services in case of a server or service failure, ensuring uninterrupted operation of systems.

Scalability: Load balancers support the growth of systems by facilitating the addition of new servers or resources, allowing systems to scale up in response to increasing demand.

Performance and Optimization: By optimizing traffic management, efficiently handling requests to specific servers, and optimizing network traffic, load balancers enhance system performance.

CMP offers load balancing as a service for the compute infrastructure. Load balancing ensures fault tolerance and improves performance of web applications by distributing incoming network traffic across virtual machines from a balancing pool. A load balancer receives and then routes incoming requests to a suitable VM based on a configured balancing algorithm and VM health.