Cloud Computing, 2nd Edition

Improving Performance Through Load Balancing

Across the web, sites experience a wide range of network traffic requirements. Sites such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Microsoft obviously experience tens of millions of user hits per day. To handle such web requests, the sites use a technique known as load balancing, as shown in FIGURE 4-5, to share the requests across multiple servers.

FIGURE 4-5 Load balancing uses a server to route traffic to multiple servers that, in turn, share the workload.

For a simple webpage, a client’s web browser requests an HTML page and then the related graphics, CSS, and JavaScript files from the web server, as shown ...