loadbalancer

Welcome folks, let your journey of practical networking begin here.
Keep calm and start balancing the load in your network 🙂

HOW IT ALL STARTED

Have you ever wondered, how the .com beasts like Google, Facebook, amazon perform miracles in our day to day life. How you use your ATM card to withdraw money and by the time you move it to your wallet you get a notification in your cellphone. How you update a post in Facebook and thousands of people can look at it right at that instance. I used to wonder how all these things are done with so much accuracy and security. Many of these things were finally answered when I started studying the concept of load balancing.

Now the immediate question which pops in the mind in “What is load balancing?”. Well as the word itself can give a hint, it’s something related to the balancing the load. Now the question is, “How is it related to Google, Amazon or any other company?”.

Most of us know that big network based companies get millions of web page request every second, now if you are using a personal computer with limited ram and hard drive capacity, handling these many requests is just a dream. So what we need is a group of computers (Ex: You can imagine how it’s always better to have many waiters to serve customers than an individual waiter to service the entire hotel.), these computers will be having same replicated data within them(Ex: How all the waiter will be holding the same menu card.).

Now the question is how do we assign these waiters to the customers (i.e which waiter will serve which customer), this is where the hotel manager comes into picture. He’ll look at the customers and plan accordingly who that particular waiter will be serving. Our manger is nothing but “load balancer”, and the customers are nothing but requests from different people.

Because of these multiple servers having same data, the companies get much more capabilities, even if one of the server goes down, another server can handle the requests. Though this function looks fairly simple, it is not. Maintaining and controlling load balancer isn’t an easy task. When companies realized that it was necessary to have multiple servers for serving these requests, engineers came with the idea of using splitting the traffic with the aid of DNS servers.