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Understanding load-balancing
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24th of September, 2010
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Table of Contents

  1. The Old Way
  2. The Stackable Way
  3. What is Load Balancing?
  4. How it Works
  5. Benefits of Load Balancing


The Old Way

One of the major problems in web development is scaling the hardware that hosts a site to fit its particular traffic needs. A site may start off serving only a few hits a month but over time it may end up serving a couple thousand hits an hour. In the past, if a site grew this way it would either have to be deployed initially on a server that can handle all of those requests, which would be a waste of money in the beginning, or it would have to be migrated to a new host, or hardware, that could support its current needs, which can cause major downtime.

The Stackable Way

If a site on Stackable experiences this kind of growth it has two options: increase the container size or create one or more additional containers and load balance across them. This article will explain load balancing and how it can benefit sites hosted on Stackable.

What is Load Balancing?

Load balancing is a pretty simple idea. In the case of Stackable load balancing it essentially splits web requests up evenly between two or more containers, thereby providing high availability at very competitive prices.

How it Works

When a web request comes in for a site hosted on Stackable, it hits the load balancer first. The load balancer then directs the requests to the containers in a round-robin manner. If for whatever reason one of those containers is down the load balancer will know to skip it.

Benefits of Load Balancing

Faster Sites

Adding more containers is essentially adding more web servers to handle the load. Imagine a bank that always has a steady flow of customers but only one teller. The line would end up getting pretty long. Now imagine if this bank hired more tellers. The line would surely shorten, if not go away completely. Load balancing a site on Stackable across multiple containers is essentially like adding new tellers to a bank, except it will speed up the site instead of shortening lines.

Increased Reliability

Adding more containers provides redundancy in case a container fails for any reason. Imagine the same bank with just one teller. What would happen if that teller were to get sick. The bank would have to have to shut down until the teller got better. Now imagine if the bank had more than one teller. If one of the tellers were to get sick the bank could stay open. If a site is load balanced across multiple containers and one of those containers happens to go down for some reason, the site will still keep on running without a hiccup.

See Also: Syncing files between multiple containers, Load Balancing a Site
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    If my polrbem was a Death Star, this article is a photon torpedo.
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