Practical Load Balancing: Ride the Performance Tiger

The emergence of the cloud and modern, fast corporate networks demands that you perform judicious balancing of computational loads. Practical Load Balancing presents an entire analytical framework to increase performance not just ofone machine, but of your entire infrastructure.

Practical Load Balancing starts by introducingkey concepts and the tools you'll need to tackle your load-balancing issues. You'll travel through the IP layers and learnhow they can create increased network traffic for you. You'll seehow to account for persistence and state, and how you can judge the performance of scheduling algorithms.

You'll then learn how to avoid performance degradation and any risk of the sudden disappearance of a service on a server.If you're concerned with running your load balancer for an entire network, you'll find out how to set upyour network topography, and condense each topographical variety into recipes that will serve you in different situations. You'll also learn about individual servers, and load balancers that can perform cookie insertion or improve your SSL throughput.

You'll also explore load balancing in the modern context of the cloud. While load balancers need to be configured for high availability once the conditions on the network have been created, modern load balancing has found its way into the cloud, where good balancing is vital for the very functioning of the cloud, and where IPv6 is becoming ever more important.

You can read Practical Load Balancing from end to end or out of sequence, and indeed, if there are individual topics that interest you, you can pick up this book and work through it once you have read the first three chapters.

What youll learn

• Judgenetwork load balancingalgorithms and when to use them
• Plan your network for optimal load balancing performance
• Configure single servers to take advantage of modern load balancing software
• Learning to use load balancing software like HAproxy, STunnel etc.
• Become familiar with implications of IPv6 and the cloud
• Improve SSL throughput and seamless application cookie insertion

Who this book is for

Network engineers, developers and IT managers.

Table of Contents
Part I: Getting Started

1. Introduction
2. How websites work: what makes them slow
3. Content Caching: keeping the load light
4. DNS based load balancing
5. Content Delivery Networks
6. Planning for Performance and Reliability

Part II: Load Balancing Essentials
7. Essential concepts you need to know
8. HTTP load balancing
9. Database load balancing
10. Load balancing your network connection
11. SSL Load Balancing

Part III: Load balancing situations