When should you use a network load balancer?

by Daniel Smith Cloud Consultant | Content Writer

The answer is "it depends". There are many different factors that can influence the decision. The most important factor is how much traffic your application receives and what kind of performance it needs to provide.

If you have an application with low traffic, then there's no need for a load balancer. If you have high traffic, then you may want to consider using one.

If you're not sure whether or not you need a load balancer, here are some questions you might ask yourself:

How much traffic does my application receive?
What kind of performance do I expect from my application?
Do I need to scale out my application horizontally (i.e., add more servers)?
Is my application stateless or stateful?
Does my application require sticky sessions?

Load balancing is used when you have multiple instances of your app running on separate machines. It allows you to distribute incoming requests across all available instances so they don't get stuck in any single instance. This way, if one machine goes down, another will take over its work.

Benefits of using a load balancer

There are several benefits of using a load balancer:
It makes scaling your application easier because you only need to manage one set of configurations instead of having to configure each server individually.
You can easily monitor the health of your application by checking the status of individual servers.
A load balancer provides fault tolerance by allowing you to restart failed servers without losing client connections.
It helps you avoid downtime during maintenance windows.
It reduces the risk of data loss due to hardware failure.
It improves security by preventing unauthorized access to your application.

When should you NOT use a load balancer?

There are also some situations where you shouldn't use a load balancer:

Your application doesn't require horizontal scalability. In this case, you don't need to worry about distributing requests among multiple servers.

You don't need fault tolerance. For example, if your application has a small number of users and you don't mind losing connections occasionally, then you don't need a load balancer.

Your application isn't stateless. A load balancer works best when your application is stateless.

Conclusion

In general, you should use a load balancer when you have high traffic and/or when your application requires high availability.