Why effective load balancing is crucial for cloud-based network failover

Moving to the cloud has proven to be a valuable step for many businesses across all industries. But like the adoption of any other technology, the effective implementation of cloud-based computing has its own unique demands and challenges.

The situation many businesses find themselves in when moving to the cloud is like what they experienced when office computers were first introduced. When computers burst onto the office scene, productivity increased but electricity demand in offices shot up. Every business had to find ways to adjust. Cloud computing has had a similar effect. While it has given enterprises the ability to use powerful applications and enormous server capacity to scale their businesses and operate more efficiently, it has also placed significant demands on networks.

To address this challenge and take maximum advantage of the power and flexibility cloud computing offers, enterprises must understand and implement effective load balancing.

Load balancing distributes user requests across backend servers

Load balancing works by distributing network traffic efficiently across multiple backend servers. It helps ensure that applications are always available and makes it easier to optimize application performance and manage workloads.

A load balancer efficiently distributes incoming user requests across a pool of backend servers using different methods and protocols, such as HTTP, TCP, or UDP. Load balancers can operate at multiple layers of the OSI model, including Layer 4 (Transport Layer) and Layer 7 (Application Layer), making them versatile tools for managing various types of network traffic.

Load balancing can be achieved in any network using hardware load balancers, software load balancers, or virtual load balancers. All load balancers use various load balancing algorithms to route traffic, such as round robin, least connection, and IP hash, to optimize the use of resources and ensure high network performance.

Effective load balancing enhances performance

An effective hardware, software, or virtual load balancing system allows a network to more efficiently route and re-route traffic as needed. When combined with the flexibility and scalability of a cloud infrastructure, load balancers benefit businesses in several ways.

By more evenly distributing network traffic and preventing any single server from being overwhelmed, load balancing boosts enterprise and web application performance, ensuring a faster response to user requests. By minimizing latency, the end user experience is improved as well, whether that’s the experience customers have on an e-commerce website or that of employees using complex applications.

Effective load balancing also optimizes use of network resources, ensuring that expensive assets aren’t underused, while also ensuring continuity of operations via automatic failover should one server go down.

Load balancing scalability

Beyond improving performance, load balancers provide superior scalability. By simplifying the process of network configuration, they make it easier for businesses to expand horizontally, adding or removing servers quickly and easily, without needing to disrupt network service or shut down other servers. Computing resources can easily be scaled up as needed to meet network demand or down to save costs when demand is lower.

Load balancing security

Load balancers can also enhance cybersecurity. By shifting network activities to backend servers, load balancing masks IP addresses where business-critical applications are hosted and operating, obscuring a common target for cyberattacks that use DDoS techniques or similar strategies. By offloading protocols such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and management of application-level firewalls, the main traffic servers can continue to efficiently process requests without getting bogged down by the process of decrypting and filtering network traffic.

Choose the right load balancer for your enterprise

The type of load balancing system you should integrate into your network should be determined by your business needs, as each one is designed to accomplish different things in different environments.

• Hardware-based load balancers are often used in data centers, as they use a physical device to provide high-performance routing and failover.
• Software-based load balancers are more often used in cloud computing environments or on virtual servers.
• Virtual load balancers offer both flexibility and cost-effectiveness, making them viable options in both physical and cloud-based environments.

Load balancers can also operate at different Layers. Application load balancers operate at Layer 7, making them well-suited to managing HTTP headers, SSL offloading, and routing of application-level data. Network load balancers operate at Layer 4 handling UDP and TCP traffic, enabling them to manage high-throughput applications.

Different algorithms are also used in load balancers, which again affect their primary applicability. Round-robin algorithms distribute requests sequentially among available servers, while the least connection method prioritizes the server with the fewest active connections. The IP hash method, on the other hand, routes traffic based on the client’s IP address, ensuring clients are always directed to the same server.

Inseego offers industry-leading, cloud-based load balancing

Inseego is a leader in modern connectivity and networking solutions, offering comprehensive load balancing tailored to meet various business needs. The Inseego 5G SD EDGE is a secure connectivity solution that combines the power of Inseego’s gigabit-class 5G devices and innovative enterprise solutions managed from the cloud. This complete solution offers cloud-based load balancing, which makes it easier to manage and configure networks, perform health checks, and optimize application traffic on-premises or in the cloud.

Whether you need help configuring your network for optimal performance, setting up DNS routing, or implementing global server load balancing for disaster recovery, our Inseego 5G SD EDGE cloud management software can make it easier to get the results you need.

With Inseego, you get access to industry-leading high-performance virtual machines, automatic failover capabilities, network flexibility with multi-SIM routers, SD-WAN and SASE dual solutions from any location, and advanced domain name system (DNS) capabilities, ensuring your web servers and applications run smoothly, securely, and efficiently in real time.

Contact us today to learn more about how Inseego can assist with cloud-based load balancing.