
Making Applications Scale With Load Balancing (or how the Internet works) - littleidea
http://www.exceliance.fr/en/ART-2006-making%20applications%20scalable%20with%20LB.pdf
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rm-rf
Good paper.

I've been using hybrid hardware/software load balancers since 2004, and over
time I came to different conclusions than the author on load balancing
algorithms, SSL offload, layer 3/4 vs. layer 7 load balancing, relative
performance of SSL on load balancers, etc.

I also place a high value on proxy-capable load balancers for use as a
'control plain' for all ingress into the data centers. I.E. - All Internet
accessible content is served by URL filtering, proxy-type, SSL capable load
balancers, even if the availability requirements do not warrant redundant
web/app servers. This allows us to control access to the application by URL
and host header, to filter content as needed, to view and manage the status of
all services at a single location, to manage all SSL certs in a single
location, to automatically re-direct users to a fail whale when the app is
down, etc.

The argument against 'doing it all' with the load balancers generally boils
down to performance. My counter to that is my circa 2004 Netscalers have no
problems doing 1800 requests/second, all SSL, all proxied, and all content
switched/content filtered.

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f1gm3nt
In the PDF it links to <http://1wt.eu/articles/2006_lb/> which is the paper in
html format. For those that don't want to download the PDF, good read =)

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thesethings
Just a heads up: It's a PDF. (Not that there's anything wrong with that :-)

Good paper. thanks for posting. Rare combination of deep AND highly readable.

I started in the middle and read through before circling and back and seeing
it was written by creator of HAProxy. So it was even more impressive how
objective/ pragmatic he was about different approaches.

