January 2018
Intermediate to advanced
378 pages
11h 34m
English
Content preview from Release It!, 2nd Edition
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Load Balancing
Almost everything we build today uses horizontally scalable farms of instances that implement request/reply semantics. Horizontal scaling helps with overall capacity and resilience, but it introduces the need for load balancing. Load balancing is all about distributing requests across a pool of instances to serve all requests correctly in the shortest feasible time. In the previous section we looked at DNS round-robin as a means of load balancing. In this section we will consider active load balancing. This involves a piece of hardware or software inline between the caller and provider instances, as illustrated in the figure.