Any modern website on the internet today receives thousands of hits, if not millions. Without any scalability strategy, the website is either going to crash or significantly degrade in performance—a situation we want to avoid. As a known fact, adding more powerful hardware or scaling vertically will only delay the problem. However, adding multiple servers or scaling horizontally without a well-thought-through approach may not reap the benefits to their full extent.
The recipe for creating a highly scalable system in any domain is to use proven software architecture patterns. Software architecture patterns enable us to create cost-effective systems that can handle billions of requests and petabytes of data. The article describes the most basic and popular scalability pattern known as Load Balancing. The concept of Load Balancing is essential for any developer building a high-volume traffic site in the cloud. The article first introduces the Load balancer, then discusses the type of Load balancers; next is load balancing in the cloud, followed by Open-source options, and finally, a few pointers to choose load balancers.