Drive Global App Availability and Traffic Management with Avi GSLB
Your daughter needs to be dropped off at soccer practice at the north end of town, and your son must be picked up from school 10 miles away – at the same time. It is common that needs for service arise in several locations at the same time. Multi-cloud environments are no different. Data traffic patterns vary depending on users and applications requirements. Distributing, or balancing the networking traffic based on available resources is the function that Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) performs. When there is an equal demand for service in different geographical locations with the expectation of a consistent “end-user” experience, meaning – you are on time. You must balance the load between you and your spouse “globally.” Similarly, GSLBs distribute the workloads and remove the imbalance between available resources and demands for services.
How Does Global Server Load Balancing Work?
As the name suggests, GSLB balances workloads across globally distributed locations regardless of the physical distance between resources. The point is that as your constituents access their applications and services, and their requests are routed intelligently by the GSLB system to the most suitable data center or cloud with the best available server. A GSLB system typically monitors the health, availability, and load for each site. It calculates client geographical locations based on their DNS server address. Traffic policies can also consider factors such as bandwidth use, network costs, exceeding thresholds, and others.
Customers have the flexibility to configure policies to meet regulatory requirements and localized content delivery needs T. For example, European countries have much stricter privacy and data residency and sovereignty laws. The regulations require that personal data about European citizens to be stored where it was collected and not allowed to be transferred outside of the national borders of the EU.
Do you want to take the best car available to pick up your kids?
Do you want to take the fastest and most reliable vehicle to pick up your kids? Of course, you do. Similarly, you want to use an agile and scalable load balancing technology to ensure optimized and efficient user-server connections, reduced latency, and reliable performance. The VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi Networks) delivers modern load balancing, including an entirely innovative way of handling global server load balancing functionality for enterprise customers. Well, it’s kind of like taking a Tesla to pick up the kids. It’s fast, reliable, spacious, nimble, engineered with excellence and has all the features you want and need for the tasks at hand.
Avi supports:
- Active / standby traffic distribution
- Active / active traffic distribution
- Geolocation database and location mapping
- Data persistence if your data center or cloud resources fail
- Rich visibility and metrics for all transactions
- Integration with public clouds to support GSLB
When – and why – should you use GSLB?
Optimal application experience for geographically distributed users
- Applications are deployed in multiple data centers
- Avi GSLB can steer user traffic to the most optimal location
Application high availability across all deployments
- Applications are deployed in multiple sites
- In case of a site failure, application instances running in the remaining site(s) can take over the user traffic
Disaster recovery
- Applications are deployed in two sites
- While both are healthy, all traffic is directed to the primary leader site
- If the primary site fails, the global DNS directs all user traffic to the other follower site
Hybrid cloud with “cloud bursting”
- Applications are deployed across private and public clouds
- When/if an application experiences an unusually high request load, Avi GSLB can automatically “burst” to a public cloud site to absorb the temporary load and subsequently spin everything back down once the load subsided to keep the cost to a minimum
Want to learn more about the GSLB?
Learn how to do multi-cloud Learn how to use multi-cloud load balancing across on-premises data centers and public cloud. Also learn how to deploy global server load balancing (GSLB) with ease in our How to Set Up Global Server Load Balancing in Just a Few Minutes video.
load balancing across on-prem data centers and public cloud, and how to setup global server load balancing (GSLB) with ease in our How to Set Up Global Server Load Balancing in Just a Few Minutes video.
Are you afraid of global app outages caused because of faulty GSLB config changes that automatically replicates across all sites? Learn how to proactively avoid this trap through enabling canary update feature when deploying GSLB in our How to Canary Update your GSLB Deployments video.
There are also some Webinars that go into more detail. Our Deep Dive on GSLB with VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer webinar covers DNS / GSLB 101, Avi’s GSLB features, and goes over use cases including active/active, active/standby deployments and failure handling.
In our Multi-Cloud Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) with Avi Networks webinar you can learn more about how to support DR scenarios for both Active / Standby and Active / Active applications, provision centrally with automated discovery of applications across sites, perform non-disruptive migration / expansion / consolidation of data centers, and multi-cloud deployments, cloud bursting, and site failure handling / recovery use cases.
If that is still not enough, we’ve got you covered. Have a peek at our Global Server Load Balancing site to learn more about Avi’s GSLB solution, or if you really want to get your nerd on, visit our GSLB documentation for more technical information.
