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Load balancers
allthemtings
Member
in General
Anyone got much experience using these? If so what’s your thoughts and are they really that necessary? I was looking at the ones offered by ovh but I can’t find much info on them
Comments
For high traffic websites? Yes.
Did you feel it was worth while? I also considered upgrading the server
As far as I know, load balancers are designed to spread the load across different servers, depending on the provider and/or software they can do a lot more and might be useful for other things as well.
Most load balancers can:
TLS offloading: They will take care of the computing required for finding the right certificate and doing the decrypting of the request, so your backend servers don't have to (should not be used everywhere, you do not want to send plain text data from an LB at OVH to a server located elsewhere, or perhaps even within OVH's network).
Load balancing: Balance the traffic between servers to not overload any of them, most offer different types: Random server, Server with the least connections, Based on a cookie, etc.
Health Checks: Backends that are offline are removed from the pool, so only working backends are used.
What features you will have depends on the provider, for example, HaProxy (software) can do a lot, like rewriting headers, the path, the query params, use different backends depending on ACLs (e.g. "ends with /test send the request to another backend"). It can also do Layer 7 retries where requests are retried in real time on other backends before an error is returned to the user in case one of your servers is having trouble on top of the normal active and passive health checks. And it can even be used as a first line of defense against HTTP floods, as you can configure rate-limits in HaProxy on specific URLs and/or from IPs. Or you can just set a global connection limit to your backends to not overload them instead. I do not think that most managed providers allow you to go that far, but it is a useful feature of HaProxy.
Load balancers are useful for a lot of things, but buying them for the sake of buying them is not necessary. You'd have to have a need for it. Like having a high-traffic website with multiple backends for example. If you just have one server, I do not see any reason for it, as it would just be an extra service in between that can fail and cause downtime. Most managed load balancers are very resilient though.
-Tim
For me the money I would lose on 3 hours of downtime would pay the extra cost of the LB setup. Also any downtime or slowness would send my users to competitors. So yes, it was worth it.
Only you can answer that. Can you afford downtime?
Also, keep in mind that serious loadbalancers can do a lot more then just balance the load, but when you get to that level you usually refer to them as ADC's.
I have used to load balancers from hetzner, so fat so good
It depends, on several things, like what you're doing and what you're trying to achieve.
We use A10 at work, at our customer's infra for our services.
Freudian slip?
At work when using Azure, we deploy load balancers everywhere even where we don’t specifically need them just in case we do in the future. They cost next to nothing and just make life simpler.
Hahaha that wasn’t expected but still fits perfectly 😂