Tag: Load Balancing

Businesses are more reliant than ever on the servers and infrastructure providing connected access to their services. These systems and applications are in constant use and have high demands and expectations for availability using terms like five nines (99.999 percent uptime) or industry-standard uptime.

Websites and applications with a large amount of traffic will benefit from load balancing. We will dive into what it is, the methods of load balancing, its benefits, and its uses for load balancing.

Misjudging incoming traffic can overload your web servers. Load balancers like HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) can help alleviate that issue. The primary job of load balancers is to balance the load on the server by minimizing response times, optimizing the usage of your resources, and improving the performance of your multi-server configuration. 

What is lsyncd?

lsyncd is a rsync-based tool that monitors specified directories (including subdirectories) for updates and modifications, and then syncs those changes to a specified destination. It is a lightweight command application that is easy to install and configure using the popular Lua language.

What is Service Mesh?

A service mesh is an additional infrastructure layer that provides a means of communication between all services in a given application. It is typically deployed as a series of proxies alongside each service instance. Since the service mesh proxies are deployed alongside the application services and not as part of it, they are often referred to as sidecars. This means that as a whole, these sidecar proxies are a mesh network and an infrastructure layer separate from the application. A service mesh not only brokers communication between all services in an application but, since all requests, both internal and external, pass through it, it provides a means for handling many tasks that can be obfuscated away from the application.

Today we will demonstrate how to install Envoy Proxy on Ubuntu. 

Introduction

All online businesses need to account for growth. As a business receives more visitors to its site, the underlying infrastructure needs to scale to provide the same level of performance that the visitors are accustomed to. Horizontal scaling, the addition of more servers rather than increasing the power of the existing servers, is an easy way to build our web servers' ability to handle a more significant amount of traffic and protect us against hardware failure. Ensuring that the additional web servers have the same files and data is a potentially time-consuming and challenging task. Automating that task using free, open-source software, such as lsyncd, is a way to ensure that we have a safe, secure, and repeatable method of copying files from one server to another.

Load balancing and replicating multiple servers has a great array of benefits, though orchestrating and keeping them in sync can be very tricky. Here, we will walk through some of the load balancing options available, as well as setting up a very basic one-way replication sync between two or more servers behind a load balancer.

The hosting world’s bread & butter solution for providing high availability and redundancy is load balancing. There are many different use cases for a Load Balancer (LB). It is important to know how to effectively manage your LB configuration so that it performs optimally in your environment.  The proceeding article will review some of the common practices that, when adhered to, provide a smooth and seamless high availability website/application through the use of load balancing.

In the past, load balanced setups have required dedicated networking equipment, which takes time and expertise to set up correctly. Liquid Web’s Cloud Load Balancer makes setup and configuration of a load balancer as easy as filling out a web form.