Distributing Network Traffic Using Azure Load Balancer
Load Balancer is the tool to manage the network traffic and distribute it across multiple servers in a cloud environment. Infiflex provides IaaS deployment and load balancer service with a hassle free distribution of traffic within the network.
Load Balancer is the tool to manage the network traffic and distribute it across multiple servers in a cloud environment.
Infiflex provides IaaS deployment and load balancer service with a hassle free distribution of traffic within the network. Get in touch with our team for enhanced network traffic management.
Load Balancer is implemented in the transport layer i.e. the Layer 4 of the Open System Interconnection Model. It uses a hashing algorithm to distribute the inbound traffic flow. Five tuple hash algorithms are used here. It helps in mapping traffic to the accessible servers. Its components are Source IP address, Source port, Destination IP address, Destination port and IP protocol number to map flows to available servers.
Data packets of the same session are sent to the same datacenter IP address behind the load balanced endpoint. For a new session initiated from the same source IP in the client end, the source port changes and traffic is directed to a different datacenter endpoint. It acts as a reverse proxy. It increases capacity, provides scalability and reliability of applications.
It requires a back end pool consisting of ‘n’ virtual machines to serve the incoming network traffic request.
IaaS requires a load balancing in the virtual network since the end user can customize own network and storage. Incase of a PaaS application end user does not need to manage networking, an integrated network load balancing is available as a part of the service.
Features of load balancer:
- Port Forwarding: To hide the public IP address of each web server in the pool it is recommended. The traffic can be forwarded to Virtual machines using inbound NAT rules.
- Automatic Reconfiguration: More Virtual machines can easily be added in the backend pool. It automatically scales up and down to reconfigure them and distribute the traffic accordingly.
- Health Probes: Load balancers can identify whether the VM in the backend pool is healthy or unhealthy. If a VM in a virtual backend pool fails to respond, the load balancer stops sending the traffic to that particular VM.
- Outbound Connections: It is a method to replace the private IP of the backend pool VM to a public IP address on the internet using the outbound NAT rules.
There are three types of service:
Azure Load Balancer: It is a public load balancer. It maps the public IP address and the incoming traffic’s port number to the private IP address and the port of the VM. It follows the hash function for load distribution.
Internal Load Balancer: It uses the private IP address to distribute the traffic to virtual machines inside a virtual network. It is for Virtual Machines connected to an internal Azure Cloud Service or a virtual network. It cannot manage traffic coming directly from the internet.
Traffic Manager: It operates at the DNS layer. It is used for balancing internet traffic between many end points. It does not route the packets individually. It uses DNS queries to send the traffic across internet resources. Resources can be in single or multiple data centers across the globe.
Load balancer is only supported for TCP and UDP protocols but does not interact, respond, or terminate with the payload of a TCP or UDP flow. It is not a proxy.
Market Trend in Load Balancer:
The market for global load balancers had a value of USD 2.6 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach USD 5.0 billion by 2023. The compound Annual Growth rate of 13.7 is predicted during the forecast period. Asia-Pacific would exhibit the highest CAGR of 15.7% during 2020-2027. The rising cloud traffic has an immense growth potential for the load balancer.
Impact of COVID-19: It has a positive impact on the Load Balancer market. Cloud service Providers are benefiting extensively owing to the trend of work from home culture. There is a surge in demand for wi-fi, 4G increasing the need to opt for Load balancing solutions.
There has been a tremendous increase in network traffic in all market segments. Network traffic pattern and its complexity is also a crucial reason.
Increasing trends for server virtualization and data centre traffic will drive the marker. Moreover government initiatives are increasing for digitization. It is being opted for better WAN optimization, web performance, decreasing latency and higher uptime and also disaster recovery management.
There has been a rapid rise in the market in the IT and Telecommunication industry. Government initiatives have played a crucial role like providing digilocker, etc. Healthcare services have experienced a boon due to the spreading of COVID19 virus which requires medical reports, online consultations etc., over the web leading to an increase in load balancer market.
Market Wise Segment of Load Balancer Market
