5 Reasons to Switch to Software Load Balancing

With the era of the internet taking the world by storm, the world of industries believes in one common aspect: scalability. And one of the various keys to this scalability is being supported by load balancing software. Load balancers can be defined as any device or software that distributes a network’s incoming traffic evenly across multiple servers.

Software load balancing is how IT administrators re-route a network’s traffic to different servers.

User requests are evaluated by load balancers by looking at application-level characteristics (the IP address, the contents of the request, or the HTTP header). The load balancer then examines the servers to decide which one receives the request.

How does software load balancing work?

Load Balancing software uniformly distributes a network’s traffic to a server from a pool of servers, according to preset algorithms. Software load balancers are designed to eradicate delays in an app or website’s responsiveness and work to keep anyone’s server from being overburdened.

Load balancing distributes workloads across multiple servers, making a network more powerful and secure. Load balancing expands a network’s capability by effectively using available servers. As a result, load balancing speeds up the network, so workloads aren’t slowed down by an overburdened server when other servers are idle. When a server fails, load balancing ensures that traffic is directed away from the failed server and to working servers, ensuring that the system remains operational.

Reasons to Switch to a Software Load Balancer

There are various reasons to turn over the hardware for high-efficiency load balancing software. Here are only a few of them:

1. Cloud-Native Applications: Modern-day apps and websites are developed to work on any data center or cloud environment. They are built to leverage the infrastructure running on bare metal servers, virtualization machines, or containers. Software load balancers are the only feasible option for microservices and container-based applications since they mimic these features. Large corporations are rapidly adopting software load balancers to meet the needs of both conventional and cloud-based applications.

• Scalability: Software load balancers have the ability to facilitate upscaling or downscaling as they use the x86 server resources over separate hardware. This brings a great deal of flexibility and caters to usher better planning and on-demand scalability, which is based on the real-time requirements of the network.

• Per-app load balancing: A major benefit of a software load balancing approach is that developers may implement custom application solutions on a per-application basis, rather than fitting multiple applications on a single hardware appliance. When opposed to hardware equipment, this approach naturally provides advantages such as isolation, improved availability, avoidance of overprovisioning, and reduced costs.

• Hybrid cloud applications: Software load balancers offer consistent app delivery infrastructure across various cloud platforms. This removes the incessant need to re-architect and re-design websites and apps when switching to the cloud or switching between cloud platforms.

• Central management across clouds: Software load balancing platforms are designed with unique and individual data and control panels to manage distributed data across all servers. Developers have access to centralized visibility and control over all configured services.

Application owners may enjoy the services and use them to implement software load balancers on any server in any location or environment, saving time and effort on installing a mobile hardware device.

• Application Visibility and Insights: Software load balancers, designated with a single data and control plane, make use of their strategic location. Lying in the path of network traffic, it analyzes traffic patterns and generates insights with regard to the same. These insights aid developers to update and repair applications much faster and help development teams to work better with end-user intelligence.

• Maintenance: Ongoing activities are streamlined, and servicing is less of a concern since there are no actual hardware appliances that need to be maintained or updated. If a single software load balancer or x86 server fails, the control plane will decide to spin up another instance and bring it into operation.

• Redundancy: If a load balancer server fails, other load balancers can be easily configured to make up for the shortfall to avoid network congestion.

• Ease of Deployment: Since no hardware is needed to configure or install, new load balancers can be deployed remotely in a matter of minutes. Almost all of the installations and deployment operations can be automated with the help of REST API, and application rollouts can be greatly accelerated instead of waiting several days or weeks to claim new IPs or load balancers.

Load balancing software is designed to support and sustain new dimensions of automation, scalability, security, and reliability for organizations all across the world. Load balancers make an easy business case as application delivery and high availability becomes ever more important. There are cost-effective load balancing solutions available, allowing any size company to enjoy the numerous benefits of load balancing.