How to choose Cloud Load Balancer for your application?

Choosing a cloud load balancer for your application is a critical task. The load balancer helps ensure your application remains available, responsive, and secure as traffic volume increases. This article will guide you through the essential features to consider when choosing a cloud load balancer and compare some of the most popular load-balancing solutions.

Essential Features

High Availability

High availability refers to systems that are designed to be available continuously. In a load-balancing context, the load balancer automatically reroutes traffic to the remaining active nodes if one node goes down.

Example: AWS ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) maintains high availability by distributing incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and AWS Lambda functions.

Scaling the Application

A cloud load balancer should seamlessly handle automatically adding or removing nodes as your application scales up or down in response to demand.

Example: Azure Load Balancer supports scale-out (adding more nodes) and scale-in (removing unneeded nodes) operations, enabling applications to scale according to real-time demands.

No or Minimum Downtime

Downtime, whether planned or unplanned, should be minimized. Your load balancer should handle node failures without disrupting service and support zero-downtime deployments.

Example: GCP Load Balancing can distribute traffic to ensure no single instance is overwhelmed, thus preventing failure and minimizing downtime.

Security on the Fly

Load balancers should provide robust security features like DDoS protection, access control, and traffic encryption.

Example: Cloudflare Load Balancing offers robust security features, including rate limiting, DDoS protection, and SSL/TLS encryption.

Better Geographical User Experience

The load balancer should ensure low latency and fast response times by directing users to the closest or fastest node.

Example: Imperva Load Balancer uses geo-location routing to direct users to the nearest data center, ensuring a better user experience.

SSL Offloading

SSL offloading refers to removing the SSL-based encryption from incoming traffic that a web server would otherwise have to do.

Example: Oracle Load Balancer supports SSL offloading, thereby freeing up resources on the backend servers to focus on delivering content.

Geo-Routing

Geo-routing is the process of routing traffic based on the client’s geographic location. It helps provide a faster user experience and ensures regulatory compliance.

Example: RackSpace Load Balancers support geo-routing, ensuring customers receive content from servers close to their geographic location, improving response times and overall user experience.

Load Balancer Comparison

Cloudflare Load Balancing

Pros:

• Provides robust security features, including automatic DDoS protection and traffic encryption.
• Offers traffic steering and failover at the edge for fast rerouting, enhancing the user experience.

Cons:

• It doesn’t integrate natively with non-Cloudflare products, which can limit flexibility in multi-cloud environments.
• Depending on usage, it can get expensive.

AWS ELB

Pros:

• It is highly integrated with other AWS services, providing an efficient and seamless environment for AWS-native applications.
• It supports three types of load balancing (Application, Network, and Classic), offering versatility.

Cons:

• It can become costly, particularly for high-traffic applications.
• The complexity and learning curve could be high for those unfamiliar with the AWS ecosystem.

GCP Load Balancing

Pros:

• GCP’s global load balancing offers a single IP address for your entire global deployment, simplifying management.
• Provides strong integration with Google Cloud services and third-party applications.

Cons:

• Costs can accumulate quickly with high-volume traffic.
• Documentation could be improved.

Azure Load Balancer

Pros:

• Deep integration with other Microsoft services can be a significant advantage for applications already within the Microsoft ecosystem.
• Supports both scale-out and scale-in operations.

Cons:

• Configuration can be complex.
• Pricing can be higher than other competitors.

RackSpace

Pros:

• Offers various types of load balancing, including L4, L7, and global load balancing.
• Provides a managed service offering, freeing up your resources to focus on core business needs.

Cons:

• More expensive than other providers.
• Less integrated with cloud services compared to AWS ELB, GCP Load Balancing, and Azure Load Balancer.

Imperva Load Balancer

Pros:

• Provides a robust set of features, including DDoS protection, failover, health checks, and geo-location routing.
• Offers both application delivery and security features in one product.

Cons:

• The pricing model can be complex.
• It may be overkill for small or less-complex environments.

Oracle Load Balancer

Pros:

• SSL offloading allows backend servers to focus more on delivering content.
• It’s well integrated with Oracle cloud services, making it ideal for Oracle-centric environments.

Cons:

• Not as feature-rich as other providers.
• Support documentation is not as comprehensive as competitors'.

Choosing a cloud load balancer is a complex task that should consider your application’s specific needs. Assessing the load balancer based on the features listed above and comparing the pros and cons of each option should help guide the decision-making process.