Wednesday
Oct222008
Server load balancing architectures, Part 1: Transport-level load balancing
Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 6:34AM
Server farms achieve high scalability and high availability through server load balancing, a technique that makes the server farm appear to clients as a single server. In this two-part article, Gregor Roth explores server load balancing architectures, with a focus on open source solutions. Part 1 covers server load balancing basics and discusses the pros and cons of transport-level server load balancing.
The barrier to entry for many Internet companies is low. Anyone with a good idea can develop a small application, purchase a domain name, and set up a few PC-based servers to handle incoming traffic. The initial investment is small, so the start-up risk is minimal. But a successful low-cost infrastructure can become a serious problem quickly. A single server that handles all the incoming requests may not have the capacity to handle high traffic volumes once the business becomes popular. In such a situations companies often start to scale up: they upgrade the existing infrastructure by buying a larger box with more processors or add more memory to run the applications.
Read the rest of the article on JavaWorld.
The barrier to entry for many Internet companies is low. Anyone with a good idea can develop a small application, purchase a domain name, and set up a few PC-based servers to handle incoming traffic. The initial investment is small, so the start-up risk is minimal. But a successful low-cost infrastructure can become a serious problem quickly. A single server that handles all the incoming requests may not have the capacity to handle high traffic volumes once the business becomes popular. In such a situations companies often start to scale up: they upgrade the existing infrastructure by buying a larger box with more processors or add more memory to run the applications.
Read the rest of the article on JavaWorld.
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