By: Tony Branson
Database Load Balancing is the technique of distributing incoming network traffic and workload across multiple servers that constitute a server farm or server pool to increase the efficiency and reduce downtime. Numerous businesses are turning to load balancing due to the plethora of advantages it brings to the table. Let’s look at five such benefits that load balancing provides for web servers.
- Increased Scalability
If you have a website, you must be uploading engaging content to attract readers. And it must be exciting to see a growing number of visitors on your site. However, it is important to remember that the amount of traffic on the website has a direct effect on the performance of the website. If there is a sudden spike in the traffic, it might become difficult for your server to handle the excess traffic and the website may crash. By introducing load balancing, the traffic can be spread across multiple servers and the increase in the traffic can be handled in a much easier manner. Depending on how the site’s traffic fluctuates, the server administrators can scale the web servers up or down depending upon your site’s needs.
- Redundancy
When you use load balancing for maintaining a website on more than one web server, the impact of hardware failure on a site’s overall uptime can be limited significantly. By implementing load balancing you can achieve redundancy. This means that when the website traffic is sent to two or more web servers and one server fails, then the load balancer will automatically transfer the traffic to the other working servers. When you maintain multiple load balanced servers, you can be assured that a working server will always be online to handle site traffic even when the hardware fails.
- Reduced Downtime, Increased Performance
If your company is located in just one place, then you can schedule the maintenance and planned downtime at non-working hours like early mornings or the weekends. However, if you have a global business with offices scattered across the world, with different time-zones, you need to implement load balancing. This will enable you to shut off any server for maintenance and channel traffic to your other resources without disrupting work in any location. This way you can reduce the downtime, maintain the uptime and improve the performance.
- Efficiently Manages Failures
Load balancing helps in detecting failures early on and manages them efficiently, making sure that failure of any kind doesn’t affect the servers or the workload. By using multiple data centers that are spread across a number of cloud providers, you can bypass the detected failures by re-distributing resources to other areas that are unaffected, thus causing minimal disruption.
- Increased Flexibility
IT administrators can enjoy great flexibility in handling website traffic by using multiple load balanced servers. They can perform several maintenance tasks on the server without impacting the site’s uptime. This is achieved by directing all the traffic to one server and putting the load balancer in active/passive mode. You have the flexibility of having a staggered maintenance system, where at least one server is always available to pick up the workload while others are undergoing maintenance. This ensures that the site’s users do not experience any outages at any time.
As an IT company, it is crucial that you maintain uptime and monitor the performance of various processes. By making database load balancing a key element, you can ensure that your processes and websites run smoothly. If you are still on the edge about using load balancing, think no more and just go for it. You will gain more than you would ever expect.
About the author:
Tony Branson is a self-proclaimed tech geek, with a passion for ScaleArc’s disruptive technology innovation in database load balancing. Tony has a passion for dissecting tech topics such as transparent failover, centralized control, ACID compliance, database scalability and downtime effects. On his days off, he can be found watching sci-fi movies, rock climbing or volunteering.
