Load Balancing in Microsoft Azure

Chapter 1. What Load Balancing Is and Why It’s Important

Load balancers have evolved considerably since they were introduced in the 1990s as hardware-based servers or appliances. Cloud load balancing, also referred to as Load Balancing as a Service (LBaaS), is an updated alternative to hardware load balancers. Regardless of the implementation of a load balancer, scalability is still the primary goal of load balancing, even though modern load balancers can do so much more.

Optimal load distribution reduces site inaccessibility caused by the failure of a single server while assuring consistent performance for all users. Different routing techniques and algorithms ensure optimal performance in varying load-balancing scenarios.

Modern websites must support concurrent connections from clients requesting text, images, video, or application data, all in a fast and reliable manner, while scaling from hundreds of users to millions of users during peak times. Load balancers are a critical part of this scalability.

Problems Load Balancers Solve

In cloud computing, load balancers solve three issues that fall under the following categories:

• Cloud bursting

• Local load balancing

• Global load balancing

Cloud bursting is a configuration between a private cloud (i.e., on-premises compute environment) and a public cloud that uses a load balancer to redirect overflow traffic from a private cloud that has reached 100% of resource capacity to a public cloud to avoid decreases in performance ...