LOAD BALANCING IN CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud Load balancing is a type of load balancing. Here workloads and computing properties are distributed in cloud across multiple resources. It enables management of workload demands or application demands by splitting the resources among several servers, networks or system.Cloud load balancing includes holding the processing of workload traffic that exist over the Internet. It reduces costs regarding document management system, improves the distribution of workload across multiple computing resources and overall performance of applications by decreasing the burden on servers associated with managing and maintaining application and networks.The traffic on the internet is growing rapidly every year, which is about 100% annually of the present traffic. Hence, the workload on the server develops more rapidly which leads to the overloading of servers mainly for popular web server.

There are two elementary solutions to overcome the problem of overloading on the servers-

• Single-server solution: Here the server is upgraded to a higher performance server. But, that doesn’t mean the new server would be working perfectly. Obviously it would be overloaded soon and would need another upgrade. But here the upgrading process is tiresome and expensive.
• Multiple-server solution: Here a scalable service system is established on a cluster of servers, making it more cost effective. Also it is scalable to build a server cluster system for network services.

Load balancing is beneficial with almost any type of service, like HTTP, SMTP, DNS, FTP, and POP/IMAP. It also rises reliability through redundancy. The easiness of scaling in the cloud means that companies can handle traffic without any downfall in their performance. This is done by placing a cloud load balancer in front of a group of application instances. It can auto scale in reaction to the level of demand. The balancing service is provided by a dedicated hardware device or program. Cloud-based servers can attain more precise scalability and availability using server load balancing.

Types Of Load Balancers:

• Software-based load balancers: Software-based load balancers run on standard hardware and standard operating systems. 
• Hardware-based load balancer: Hardware-based load balancers includes Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) adapted for a particular use. ASICs allows high speed promoting of network traffic. You can use it for transport-level load balancing because hardware-based load balancing is faster than software solution. 

Major Examples of Load Balancers –

• Direct Routing Requesting Dispatching Technique: Here a real server and load balancer share the virtual IP address. The load balancer takes an interface with the virtual IP address that accepts request packets and it directly routes the packet to the selected servers. 
• Dispatcher-Based Load Balancing Cluster: A dispatcher does smart load balancing by utilizing server availability, workload, capability to regulate where to send a TCP/IP request. The dispatcher module of a load balancer can split HTTP requests among various nodes in a cluster. The dispatcher distributes the load among many servers in a cluster so the services of various nodes seem like a virtual service on an only IP address. 
• Linux Virtual Load Balancer: It is an opensource load balancing solution, helps in establishing extremely scalable and available network services such as HTTP, POP3, FTP, SMTP, media and caching and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The load balancer is the primary entry point of server cluster systems and can execute Internet Protocol Virtual Server (IPVS), which implements transport-layer load balancing in the Linux kernel also known as Layer-4 switching.