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Practical Load Balancing: Ride the Performance Tiger

Practical Load Balancing: Ride the Performance Tiger

by Eelco Plugge, David Hows, Peter Membrey
Publisher: Apress
Release Date: April 2012
ISBN: 9781430236801
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Book Description

The emergence of the cloud and modern, fast corporate networks demands that you perform judicious balancing of computational loads. Practical Load Balancing presents an entire analytical framework to increase performance not just of one machine, but of your entire infrastructure.

Practical Load Balancing starts by introducing key concepts and the tools you'll need to tackle your load-balancing issues. You'll travel through the IP layers and learn how they can create increased network traffic for you. You'll see how to account for persistence and state, and how you can judge the performance of scheduling algorithms.

You'll then learn how to avoid performance degradation and any risk of the sudden disappearance of a service on a server. If you're concerned with running your load balancer for an entire network, you'll find out how to set up your network topography, and condense each topographical variety into recipes that will serve you in different situations. You'll also learn about individual servers, and load balancers that can perform cookie insertion or improve your SSL throughput.

You'll also explore load balancing in the modern context of the cloud. While load balancers need to be configured for high availability once the conditions on the network have been created, modern load balancing has found its way into the cloud, where good balancing is vital for the very functioning of the cloud, and where IPv6 is becoming ever more important.

You can read Practical Load Balancing from end to end or out of sequence, and indeed, if there are individual topics that interest you, you can pick up this book and work through it once you have read the first three chapters.

Table of Contents

  1. Title
  2. Dedication
  3. Contents at a Glance
  4. Contents
  5. About the Authors
  6. About the Technical Reviewers
  7. Special Thanks to serverlove
  8. Acknowledgments
  9. Preface
    1. Target Audience
    2. Book Structure
    3. Downloading the Code
  10. CHAPTER 1: Introduction
    1. The Problem
    2. The Solution
    3. What Is Load Balancing?
    4. Load Balancing, Finally
    5. Summary
  11. CHAPTER 2: How Web Sites Work
    1. Let the Games Commence!
    2. Taking a Closer Look
    3. The Network
    4. HTML and the Web
    5. Web Content
    6. Databases: The Weakest Link
    7. Summary
  12. CHAPTER 3: Content Caching: Keeping the Load Light
    1. What Is a Cache?
    2. Whistle Stop Tour
    3. Caching Theory: Why Is It so Hard?
    4. Web Proxies
    5. Edge-based Caching: Introducing Varnish
    6. Summary
  13. CHAPTER 4: DNS Load Balancing
    1. DNS Details
    2. DNS in Depth
    3. DNS Caching
    4. BIND9
    5. DNS Load Balancing
    6. Summary
  14. CHAPTER 5: Content Delivery Networks
    1. Choosing a CDN Provider
    2. Getting Started with Rackspace
    3. Adding Content to Your CDN Account
    4. The Rackspace Cloud Files API
    5. Summary
  15. CHAPTER 6: Planning for Performance and Reliability
    1. yoU MAke DInner In TiME
    2. Backups
    3. Summary
  16. CHAPTER 7: Load Balancing Basics
    1. What Is Load Balancing?
    2. What Computing Resources Are Available?
    3. Load Balancing in Practice
    4. Guiding Principles
    5. Summary
  17. CHAPTER 8: Load Balancing Your Web Site
    1. Measuring Web Server Performance
    2. Accelerating Apache HTTP
    3. Accelerating nginx
    4. Load Balancing Your Web Server
    5. Best of Both Worlds
    6. Summary
  18. CHAPTER 9: Load Balancing Your Database
    1. Setting up the MySQL Cluster
    2. Applying Load Balancing
    3. Summary
  19. CHAPTER 10: Network Load Balancing
    1. Sharing the Workload
    2. TCP/IP
    3. Routing
    4. The Load Balancer
    5. IPVS
    6. IPVSADM
    7. Expanding IPVS
    8. Advanced IPVS
    9. Making It Stick
    10. Summary
  20. CHAPTER 11: SSL Load Balancing
    1. What are SSL and TLS?
    2. Public-Key Cryptography
    3. Trust and Certificate Authorities
    4. TLS Encryption
    5. TLS Load Balancing
    6. Configuring SSL on Your Web Server
    7. SSL Acceleration
    8. Nginx
    9. SSL Termination
    10. Configuring Nginx
    11. Testing the SSL
    12. Further Configurations
    13. LVS and Your SSL Terminator
    14. Integrated Load Balancer/SSL Terminator
    15. Summary
  21. CHAPTER 12: Clustering for High Availability
    1. High Availability
    2. Single Point of Failure
    3. Clustering
    4. IPVS Failover
    5. Testing
    6. Web Server Specifics
    7. Advanced Config Options
    8. Summary
  22. CHAPTER 13: Load Balancing in the Cloud
    1. Cloud Computing
    2. Virtualization
    3. Virtualized Resources
    4. Managing Virtual Resources
    5. Cloud Elasticity
    6. Working with a Cloud Server
    7. Summary
  23. CHAPTER 14: IPv6: Implications and Concepts
    1. IPv6
    2. Hexadecimal Notation
    3. Truncation
    4. IPv4 Exhaustion
    5. Approach to IPv6
    6. Advantages of IPv6
    7. Implementation
    8. Internet Connection
    9. DNS
    10. Operating System
    11. Networking
    12. Application Support
    13. Summary
  24. CHAPTER 15: Where to Go Next…
    1. Recap
    2. Monitoring
    3. Security
    4. Operating System Performance
    5. Planning
    6. Summary
  25. Index