Alexis Kestler
Ensuring high availability and scalability for web applications is crucial these days, especially if you expect high traffic volumes. Using a load balancer is one of the best ways to achieve this.
As an infrastructure geek, I always recommend load balancers for production websites and web apps. They provide huge benefits for performance, scalability, and uptime.
A load balancer acts as a reverse proxy, sitting in front of your backend application servers. It distributes incoming client requests across those servers, providing increased capacity and reliability. The load balancer handles the work of routing and balancing traffic automatically so the application itself doesn‘t have to.
Let‘s explore some top cloud-based load balancing options for achieving highly available infrastructure.
Why Cloud Load Balancing?
Traditional hardware load balancers can cost upwards of $5,000 or more, putting them out of reach for many small to medium sized operations. However, with cloud-based solutions you can get load balancing for as little as $20 per month.
According to a survey by RightScale, enterprise adoption of cloud-based load balancing grew over 200% from 2016 to 2018. And no wonder – cloud load balancers offer all the benefits of traditional hardware balancers at a fraction of the cost.
If you‘re looking to build a highly available and scalable application, cloud load balancers are worth considering. They provide flexibility, rapid deployment, and overall better TCO than traditional on-prem hardware options.
Top Options for Load Balancing in the Cloud
Based on my experience managing infrastructure for web apps, here are my top picks for cloud load balancers:
1. Amazon Web Services Elastic Load Balancing
AWS offers a robust and fully-featured load balancing service. With AWS you have a choice of three main load balancer types:
- Application Load Balancer – Best suited for layer 7 HTTP/HTTPS traffic. This is my default choice for web apps.
- Network Load Balancer – For ultra-fast TCP and UDP traffic at layer 4.
- Classic Load Balancer – AWS‘s legacy balancer, can handle HTTP/HTTPS, TCP and SSL.
The Application Load Balancer should cover most web application scenarios.
Here are some key capabilities:
- HTTP/2 and WebSocket support
- Integrated SSL/TLS termination with AWS Certificate Manager
- Route requests based on hostname, path, headers, etc.
- WAF integration to protect against attacks
- Detailed performance monitoring and metrics
AWS provides granular load balancer metrics out-of-the-box including request counts, latency, active connections and more. This is invaluable in tuning the application.
According to 2021 Gartner research, AWS holds 44% market share in the cloud infrastructure market, more than the next three competitors combined. The scale and maturity of AWS makes it a top choice for load balancing.
Pricing starts at $0.02 per hour + $0.008 per GB of data processed. They offer a pricing calculator to estimate costs.
2. Google Cloud Load Balancing
For those already on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google‘s cloud load balancing is highly capable.
Like AWS, Google offers layer 4 and layer 7 balancer options:
- HTTP(S) Load Balancing – For web apps and REST APIs. This is Google‘s Layer 7 option.
- Network Load Balancing – For other TCP/UDP protocols at layer 4.
The HTTP(S) load balancer supports features like:
- Global load balancing architecture.
-Autoscaling based on demand signals like requests per second. - Content-based routing and sharding.
- Integrated health checks and failover capabilities.
According to Google, their load balancing system can handle more than 1 million requests per second. Impressive!
Google has about 8% market share in cloud infrastructure, so they are trusted for mission-critical workloads.
Pricing starts at $0.025 per hour + $0.008 per GB processed. Overall costs are very competitive with other leading cloud providers.
3. Cloudflare Load Balancing
For flexible load balancing that works across cloud providers, check out Cloudflare.
The Cloudflare load balancer sits in front of your origin servers and leverages their massive global network. This means it can route traffic across origins based on real-time health, latency, and other factors.
Some key advantages:
- Load balance origins outside of Cloudflare‘s network
- Won‘t lock you into a single cloud provider
- Intelligent load balancing algorithms
- Real-time analytics
- Failover capabilities
Pricing is simple at $5 per month plus $0.001 per request. For non-enterprise workloads this can be very cost-effective.
According to W3Techs, Cloudflare has rapidly grown to have an 11% market share of the content delivery network market. Their load balancing caters to their strength in networks and performance.
Other Notable Options
Beyond the top 3, there are other decent cloud load balancers including:
- Microsoft Azure – Layer 7 Application Gateway and layer 4 load balancer options.
- DigitalOcean – Simple LB for distributing traffic across Droplets.
- Linode NodeBalancers – Load balancing starting at $10/month.
- Rackspace – Feature rich load balancers starting at $20/month.
Each has pros and cons based on the specific feature set and cloud ecosystem.
I suggest reviewing the options to find the right fit based on your architecture and traffic requirements. Many provide free trials to test implementations.
Key Factors to Consider
Here are some things I advise customers to consider when selecting a cloud load balancer:
- HTTP vs TCP – Do you need layer 4 or layer 7 capabilities? This affects options.
- Use case – Static content vs dynamic? Types of protocols?
- Hybrid cloud – Will you load balance across cloud providers?
- Traffic volume – More traffic means higher costs. Check pricing tiers.
- Global reach – If globally distributed, look for load balancers with worldwide POPs.
- Integration – How easily can you manage, monitor, and automate the load balancer?
- Support – What support levels does the vendor provide?
Think about these aspects to ensure you choose the right load balancer for your specific application architecture and business needs.
The Key Benefits of Load Balancing in the Cloud
Here‘s a recap of the major benefits you gain by deploying cloud-based load balancers:
- High availability – No single point of failure, redundant and fault-tolerant
- Increased capacity – Horizontally scale backend servers to handle more load
- Flexibility – Cloud-based and software load balancers are more agile
- Performance – Users get routed to the fastest responding backends
- Cost savings – No expensive hardware balancer appliance needed
- Automated scaling – Auto scale backends up and down based on traffic
- Health monitoring – Backend health checks ensure traffic goes to available servers
By effectively distributing requests across backend application servers, you can ensure maximum performance, uptime, and capacity for users around the world.
Conclusion
I hope this overview has been helpful in highlighting some of the best cloud-based load balancers available today. If you‘re building applications for scale and reliability, utilizing a modern load balancer is a must.
The options covered provide enterprise-grade features starting at very reasonable monthly prices. By offloading traffic distribution to a cloud load balancer, you can focus on developing the best application while assuring high availability.
Let me know if you have any other questions! I‘m always happy to dig deeper into topics like this.
