Hi, everyone, and welcome back.
Now in today's video, we are going to discuss about the load balancing solutions available in A.
S.
Now, when we discuss about the overall load balancing solutions in the industry, there are multiple
software as well as hardware based solutions that are available.
Some of the popular tools used for load balancing are engine X Edge Proxy and various others.
Now, although these tools are quite popular and are used in many of the products and websites, but
it comes with its own set of disadvantages.
Now whenever you are configuring your own load balancing solutions, maybe on easy two instances, there
are a lot of responsibility that falls to the customer side.
So some of these responsibility includes the high availability of the load balancer itself, the overall
security, the performance and so on.
For example, let's say in this specific diagram, you have an engine X based load balancer that is
load balancing between the customer and a set of servers.
Now, what happens if this load balancer itself goes down?
So as an administrator, you have to ensure that this load balancing solution is also highly available.
Second thing is we were discussing about security.
It can happen that the software is related to engine x proxy.
There will be some security vulnerabilities that might appear there.
So you have to take care of the patching, you have to take care of vulnerabilities, patch management
and so on.
And third part is the performance.
If things are not really working as expected, if there are issues related to performance, then you
will have to take care of that.
One other approach that organizations generally use is they have support.
For example, let's say that they are using an engine X as a load balancer.
They generally have some kind of a premium support with engine X.
So in case if things are not really working well, they are not getting as good performance as expected.
They can connect with the engine support.
But again, the support part is also quite expensive there.
All right.
So these are the high level challenges that organization typically faces whenever they make use of some
kind of a hardware or a software base load balancing solutions by themselves.
Now, for most of the organization, one of the common architectural pattern would generally include
a load balancer.
Now, we have already discussed about some of the disadvantages associated with maintaining the load
balancing solution.
So that would mean that most of the organizations that are based on air base would also face these kind
of challenges.
So in order to overcome these issues, Ada has released their own load balancing solution.
All right.
And this load balancing solution is referred to as elastic load balancing.
Now, one of the great thing about the elastic load balancing is not only it allows customers to overcome
these set of challenges, but along with that, it also has a tight integration with multiple services.
For example, you have various features in various services.
In a place like auto scaling, you have web application firewall, you have the certificate manager,
you also have various other services like global accelerator and so on.
So this specific elastic load balancing service that is offered by ADA also integrates well with various
other services.
So if an organization is using these services and if they're using the elastic load balancing solution
by either the integration is out of the box and only some configuration will have to be changed to integrate
them.
Now also one thing to note is that if you're using the elastic load balancing solution by a place,
the high availability part is taken care by the security of the load balancer is taken care by it,
and even the performance part is taken care by the E.
So in such case, both ADA is happy because the customers are able to scale their infrastructure well.
And also the customers are happy because the overall load balancing has become much more simpler.
Now, before we proceed further, let me quickly give you a demo associated with this.
Now for today's demo, I have two ESI, two instances that are running.
One is referred to as a demo server zero one, and second one is referred to as demo server zero two.
And both of them has their own individual website.
So let's quickly open up the demo server zero one.
I'll copy the public IP and when I paste it within the browser, you see you get the basic content which
is website zero one.
Similarly for the demo server zero two, if I copy the public IP and if I paste it in the browser,
this time you see it states website zero two.
Now along with this, I also have a load balancing solution that is up and running in a place.
So this is our load balancer.
The name is Demo Hyphen ALB.
Let's copy the DNS name associated with the load balancer and from a newer tab I'll go ahead and paste
the DNS name here.
And currently you see the traffic is directed towards website zero two.
If I refresh the page this time it went to website zero one.
If I refresh again, again, it went to website zero two.
Great.
This is one part.
Second part we were discussing is associated with the integration.
So for example, you have integration with global accelerator, integration with config, integration
with VAF, and there are various other integration that are available out of the box.
Now generally, when you use your own kind of a software base load balancers or even a hardware based
load balancers, these integrations are generally not available out of the box.
So there are a lot of scripts that you will have to write to achieve a specific use case.
But if you are making use of the load balancing service, you don't really have to worry about this.
Now when we discuss about load balancing in a, there are four primary types of load balancers that
are available.
One is referred to as the application load balancer.
You have a network load balancer, you have a gateway load balancer, and you have a classic load balancer.
Now note that although there are four different types of load balancing solutions that are available,
but at a common, all of them are designed to do one thing, which is to load balance the traffic between
multiple set of targets.
Now, what kind of target what are the type of protocols that are supported the first based on the load
balancer that you choose.
So first, let's go ahead and look into the application load balancer.
So an application load balancer makes the routing decision at the application layer, which is the HTTP
https layer.
Nowadays, whenever you visit a website, you type HTTP or https followed by the domain name.
So this is where the application load balancer comes into picture.
For example, you have a user and the user has typed a domain, say example dot com slash videos now
in the application load balancer.
Since it works at the HTTP or HTTPS level, it can go ahead and take this request.
And based on the rules that are added to the application load balancer, for example, you have two
rules.
One is for slash videos.
Second is for slash payment.
So it can say that whenever traffic comes to the application load balancer and the other is less videos,
then the traffic will go to the server one according to the rule.
According to the second rule, if a user is visiting a page with a URL of payment, then the traffic
will go to the server too.
So all of this is related to the overall HTTP protocol itself.
So this is where the application load balancer comes into picture.
Now, in fact, let me quickly show you this, because I already have this configured.
So generally when I type slash videos over here, you see it goes to the video's website.
When I change this video to Payment Warrior, it went to the payment site.
All right.
So this is one of the unique features associated with the application load balancer.
Note that it works primarily on the HTTP https.
So if you look into the URL, in fact, let me copy this.
And if I add it in the notepad, you see the browser automatically had added the HTTP over here.
The second type of load balancer is referred to as a network load balancer.
Now the network load balancer makes routing decision at a transport layer, which is like the TCP,
the UDP and so on.
Now one of the unique benefits of network load balancer is that it can handle millions of requests per
second.
So in the use case where you need ultra high performance, this is where the network load balancer comes
into picture.
Now, one more important thing to note is that not everything works based on the HTTP https protocol.
There are a lot of other protocols where the application also can be designed.
So when you have a specific application that does not make use of the HTTP https protocol, then you
cannot go ahead and use the application load balancer there.
You will have to use a network load balancer.
In such cases, the third type of load balancer is referred to as a gateway load balancer, or this
is a relatively newer load balancer type when compared to others.
And at a high level overview gateway load balancer allows you to deploy, scale and manage the virtual
appliance like firewalls, intrusion detection systems, prevention systems and so on.
So, for example, whenever you have some kind of a virtual appliance like its IP systems firewalls,
and if you want to go ahead and load balancer traffic for them, you make use of the gateway load balancer
there.
Now again, one important thing that needs to be noted is that most of the time in organization, you
will see either the application load balancer or the network load balancer being used.
Product application that has been developed by the customer.
Occasionally, in case the organization is also using some kind of IP solution, they can use the gateway
load balancer, but this is not very common and the last load balancer type.
In fact, this is the oldest load balancer type, which is the classic load balancer.
Now, classic load balancer primarily works based on both the TCP as well as the HTTPS.
Now this is a previous generation load balancer and it is generally not recommended.
Now, before we conclude, in fact, let me quickly show you.
Now, whenever you go ahead and create a load balancer in a case, you will see that there are three
primary load balancer type application network and gateway.
Along with that, you also have a previous generation load balancer called as the classic load balancer.
Now if you look into the application load balancer, it states both HTTP as well as HTTPS.
For network load balancer, you have TCP, UDP and TLS.
If you look into the classic load balancer, you have the HTTP and https, which is generally the feature
of application load balancer, but it also has the TCP and SSL, which is one of the features of the
network load balancer.
Now generally in place, what used to happen earlier, there was only one load balancer type called
the classic load balancer and either this was releasing features related to HTTP, TCP and everything
in a single load balancer type.
And this was not very scalable and this is one of the reasons why it is then split it into two primary
load balancer type each based on a specific function where application load balancer are dedicated for
HTTP and HTTPS network load balancer are dedicated for TCP, UDP, TLS and so on.
And then incrementally, there were new features that were added to each set of load balancers here.
Great.
So let's go ahead and look into the summaries.
Like sometimes in the exams, what they generally do is they give you a use case and they'll say, which
is the load balancer that you will be using in such use case.
We will you be using network load balancer, application load balancer and so on.
And this is one of the reasons why it is important to understand the load balancer and its associated
use case where it is useful, for example, for application load balancer, it is used when you have
a website application listening on layer seven, which is HTTP, and http is primarily for this use
case.
Second is the network load balancer, which are generally used for the TCP and UDP based application.
And you can also prefer it when you have a requirement to handle millions of requests per second and
when you need an ultra high performance.
Third is a gateway load balancer.
You generally use it when you have some kind of a virtual appliance, like a firewall or a IDs, IP
systems and so on.
Now along with that, it also maintains a page related to the elastic load balancing feature.
Over here and within here you have the application network gateway and the classic load balancer, and
within here they have specified the features and whether they are associated with a specific load balancing
solution.
So this is where you can go ahead and understand in more detail related to what are the things that
are specific load balancer supports so that you can choose the right set of load balancer for your organization.
Great.
So with this will conclude today's video.