Cloud load balancing is a process that distributes workloads and computing resources across multiple computers, networks, or servers in a cloud computing environment. It enables businesses to manage workloads or application requirements by efficiently distributing resources among various devices. By utilizing cloud load balancing, organizations can manage the flow of workload traffic and requests that occur over the internet.
As the internet traffic continues to grow exponentially, with an estimated 100% growth rate each year, the workload on servers continues to increase, particularly for popular web servers. To address this issue of overloading, there are two primary solutions.
First is a single-server solution in which the current server is upgraded to a more powerful version. While this is an effective method for immediate performance improvement, it is expensive and may soon become overloaded, requiring further upgrades.
Second is a multiple-server solution in which a cluster of servers is used to create a scalable service system. By using a cluster of servers, the system is able to better handle increasing workloads and is more cost effective in the long run. As the service demands increase, additional servers can easily be added to the cluster to meet the demands.
Load balancing is an important component of any type of service, such as HTTP, SMTP, DNS, FTP, and POP/IMAP. It ensures reliability and redundancy by distributing the load of incoming requests among multiple servers. This is achieved using a dedicated hardware device or program, often located within a cloud-based server farm. This allows for greater scalability and availability, as well as more precise load balancing.
Cloud Computing Platforms and Technologies
Cloud computing applications are developed using platforms and frameworks that provide different types of services. These services range from basic infrastructure to customized applications that serve specific purposes. By leveraging these services, developers can create applications that are tailored to their needs.
Amazon Web Services
AWS provides a wide range of cloud-based IaaS services, ranging from virtual compute, storage, and networking to complete computing stacks. AWS is renowned for its on-demand storage and compute services, namely Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). EC2 enables end users to customize virtual hardware configurations, including GPU and cluster instances, which can be used as the base infrastructure for deploying computing systems on the cloud. AWS users can access EC2 through either the AWS console—a comprehensive web portal for retrieving AWS services—or the web services API available for various programming languages. EC2 also offers the capability of saving an active instance as an image, thus allowing users to create their own templates for deploying systems. These templates can be stored in S3 and retrieved from anywhere. Additionally, EC2 and S3, a wide range of services can be leveraged to build virtual computing systems, including networking support, caching systems, DNS, database support, and more.
Google AppEngine
Google AppEngine is a cloud platform that allows developers and engineers to build, test and deploy web applications. It is designed to be highly scalable, allowing applications to dynamically adjust to the demand. AppEngine provides a secure environment and a collection of services that makes it easier for developers to create high-performance web applications. These services include caching, a scalable data store, job queues, messaging, and corn tasks. Developers can utilize the AppEngine SDK to test and profile applications on their own systems, and once development is complete, they can easily deploy the application to AppEngine, set cost quotas and make the application available to the public. Currently, the supported programming languages are Python, Java, and Go.
Azure
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and operating system which enables users to develop applications and services in the cloud. It provides a highly scalable and reliable runtime environment for web and distributed applications. On Azure, applications are organized around roles, which are units of application distribution and represent the application’s logic. Additionally, Azure offers a comprehensive suite of services which supplement the application execution process, including support for storage, networking, caching, content delivery, and more.
Hadoop
Apache Hadoop is an open source framework designed for processing large data sets on commodity hardware. It is based on the MapReduce model, an application programming model developed by Google. MapReduce provides two fundamental operations for data processing: mapping and reducing. Hadoop is sponsored by Yahoo!, who have been committed to transforming the project into a cloud computing platform suitable for enterprise use. This platform is now an integral part of the Yahoo! Cloud infrastructure, and is used to support many business processes. In addition, Yahoo! currently manages the world’s largest Hadoop cluster, which is also available to academic institutions.