Cloud Load Balancer – Mechanism and Types of Load Balancer

Cloud Load Balancer is becoming more popular right now after Rackspace and Amazon Cloud has introduced their Cloud Load Balancer Services.
We will not go to the core technology, simply because our target is to provide the basic knowledge about Computer Science in General and Cloud Computing, virtualization etc to the general public. Although this particular article on Cloud Load Balancer particularly needs much more technical details unlike our other posts, we will try to be not too much equation centric.
Two big brands which delivers Cloud Load balancing are Rackspace Cloud and Amazon Cloud, Amazon brands it as Elastic Load Balancing and Rackspace keeps the name Cloud Load Balancer.

What this Cloud Load Balancer actually does?

Load balancing is especially important for sites those wants to scale quickly and want to have the ability to split the traffic load between different cloud servers. Static IP addresses, high availability. Here is an diagram from Rackspace Cloud which explains in very simple way, how this Cloud Load Balancer works :

Difference between Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer and Rackspace Cloud Load Balancer

Rackspace Cloud Load Balancer is based on Zeus’ load balancing technology, where as Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancing, uses round-robin load balancing.

It is a bit difficult to explain the difference between Rackspace Cloud Load Balancer and Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancing without going in to the technical details. The basic target of the mechanism is almost the same – offloading the load of a server to various servers.

Important Points on Cloud Load Balancer

It must have to be noted that, for deploying any kind of Cloud Load Balancer needs time and personnel to configure it properly. For Rackspace Cloud Load Balancer, both GUI based and API based control system are available.

It obviously points to one thing – Cloud Load Balancer can decrease the page loading time through Connection Throttling. The major prohibitive point for Cloud Load Balancer is the cost, making Cloud Load Balancer only usable by the corporate sector, unlike CDN, which actually does the two desirable things of Cloud Load Balancer – offloads the pressure on the main server and decrease the page loading time.

For Rackspace Cloud Load Balancer, when Service Net there is no charge for the Bandwidth. Basically it should be configured in a way, so that the total system switches to Cloud Load Balancer, when the load on your server increases – as charge of Cloud Load Balancer is calculated on hourly basis and number of concurrent connections.