The basic premise of load balancing is simple: distribute application traffic across multiple servers to prevent individual server instances from becoming overwhelmed with incoming traffic.
However, in the cloud era, load balancers have evolved much farther. Besides playing an integral role in the high availability of applications, load balancers are also important protecting mission-critical applications from security threats and vulnerabilities, moving workloads across different public clouds, integrating with CI/CD processes, automating application rollout, providing elastic scale based on application loads, and giving visibility into network, application health as well as end-user experience.
The Native Load Balancing Solutions
AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offer multiple native solutions that meet some of the load-balancing requirements of modern-day applications. Some of these load balancers offer additional capabilities like DNS services, WAF, and autoscaling as additional services. However, they lack advanced security policies, SSL insights, and DDoS capabilities. Admins and developers do not have integrated real-time telemetry and must deploy third party tools and services for analytics. Inconsistent capabilities across clouds and on-premises create challenges for network engineers to move workloads across multi-cloud infrastructures. This also forces enterprises to re-invest in training and education. Using native tools locks enterprises to the specific cloud, preventing workload mobility, and increasing business risk.
The Alternative
Providing the best of both worlds – cloud native elasticity and automation, and complete enterprise features – the VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi Networks) delivers full-featured L4 – L7 load balancing, intelligent web application firewall (WAF), advanced HTTP content switching capabilities, customizable health monitoring, DNS/IPAM services, and GSLB across multiple clouds. Avi enables dynamic workload mobility across clouds based on business metrics such as cost, performance, security, and compliance requirements, reducing risk and providing flexibility – all from one single integrated platform.
VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS together with Avi brings public cloud experience to VMware customers in the easiest way possible. Customers uses the same VMware software and policies with complete enterprise grade load balancing features on VMC, which enables customers to run production applications, with easy day 0 automation.
To illustrate how easy it is to setup enterprise grade load balancing with Avi, this four-part video series will show how to set up Avi on AWS, Azure, GCP and on VMC The Avi cloud connectors enables the integration and facilitation of turnkey deployments of application services across private, public and hybrid cloud environments. This abstraction allows Avi to be agnostic to the underlying infrastructure and let you focus on consistent policies and delivering applications.
1. How to Set Up Enterprise Grade Load Balancing in AWS
Learn to deploy enterprise grade load balancing in AWS. Integrate modern, advanced load balancing with AWS components such as Route53 and AutoScaleGroup. Provision multi availability zone application deployment leveraging the tight load balancing integration with AWS.
Learn more about Application Delivery in Amazon Web Services
2. How to Set Up Enterprise Grade Load Balancing in Azure
Learn to deploy enterprise grade load balancing in Azure. Integrate modern, advanced load balancing with Azure components such as AzureDNS and ScaleSet. Deploy a sample application that lives in virtual machine scale set so that backend pool members can be scaled based on the traffic load.
Learn more about Enterprise-Grade Application Delivery for Microsoft Azure
3. How to Set Up Enterprise Grade Load Balancing in GCP
Learn to deploy enterprise grade load balancing in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Integrate modern, advanced load balancing with GCP components such as DNS and Instance Group. Explore load balancing deployment types in GCP through the seamless integration between multi-cloud application services and GCP.
Learn more about Application Delivery for Google Cloud Platform
4. How to Set Up Advanced Load Balancing in VMware Cloud (VMC)
Deploying a load balancer across hybrid-cloud environments can be an intimidating and time-consuming task. As your enterprise migrates to the public cloud with VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS, how can you deploy advanced load balancing in a matter of minutes? Learn how to automate day 0 operations in your VMC on AWS and make it application ready. Bring modern, advanced load balancing to VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS in a matter of minutes.
Learn more about Load Balancing in VMware Cloud
Summary
Load balancers have outgrown their initial job description of distributing traffic and ensuring high availability. Today, they also play vital roles in securing the network and applications they serve, supporting and enabling rapid application development and deployment, and giving organizations comprehensive insights into their network and application health.
The native load balancers offered by AWS, Azure and GCP are very similar in terms of capabilities and features, but do they meet all requirements demanded by today’s modern multi-cloud infrastructure?
When integrating a load balancer into a cloud application architecture, it is important to very carefully evaluate and compare the available features offered by each service provider to guarantee you are not compromising on either performance, security or features.
