Cloud Load Balancing services can make the difference

When you hear the term “load balancing”, what do you think of? The term basically refers to work that needs to be done that is too much for one resource to handle, prompting other resources to help out and get the job done.

In the IT world, load balancing is the practice of distributing a workload across multiple computers for improved performance. Load balancing distributes work among resources in such a way that all of the resources are handling similar loads which leads to improved performance and higher uptime.

Network traffic, SSL requests, database queries, or even hardware resources such as memory can be load balanced. Also, it’s best to provision the load balancer in the same environment as the resources it is load balancing.

• What is Cloud Load Balancing?

An increasing number of companies are running multiple applications in the cloud to customers in many geographic areas.  Customers might use a cloud-based CRM to store customer information, a cloud-based ERP system to track product data and a web-hosting vendor to host its website. The larger CRM and ERP cloud vendors you have adopted in your business use cloud load balancing, so when a company’s computing infrastructure is hosted in the cloud, doesn’t it makes sense to use cloud load balancers to distribute the load, decrease latency and increase availability.

Cloud load balancing Like other forms of load balancing, cloud load balancing enables you to maximize application performance and reliability. Its advantages over traditional on-premise load balancing is the ability to balance loads between multiple geographic locations.

• Benefits of Cloud Load Balancing

The benefits of cloud load balancing arise from the scalable and global character of the cloud itself.

The ease and speed of scaling in the cloud means that organizations can handle traffic spikes without degraded performance by placing a cloud load balancer in front of a group of application instances, which can quickly grow and shrink in reaction to the level of demand.

At the same time, the ability to host an application at multiple cloud hubs around the world can boost reliability. For example, if a power outage hits the northeastern U.S. after a snowstorm, the cloud load balancer can direct traffic away from cloud resources hosted there to resources hosted in other parts of the country.

• What you need to know before running apps in the cloud

In order to run critical business applications in the cloud, you first have to make sure that the load balancing services are provided equal, both in terms of reliability and functionality to legacy environments. So, here are the basic questions that need to be addressed:

• Service Level Assurance (SLA) – Is the cloud load balancer guaranteeing the availability and performance of each tenant application without it being affected by other applications or tenants?

• Operational Efficiency – Are the cloud services enabling easy provisioning and management for multiple tenants and applications, without increasing operational expenditure and risk of human errors?

• Security – How can you keep business-critical applications secure on the cloud, secluding them from other hosted application failures or security breaches?

Finally, what you have to keep in mind is that Cloud Load Balancers manage online traffic by distributing workloads across multiple servers and resources. They maximize your workload performance and help prevent overload to give your users a seamless experience.

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