Why You Should Choose a Software-Based Load Balancer

Rick Nelson

Nginx, Inc.

About this webinar

The world is moving to software-based approaches and away from

using proprietary and static hardware. This has been driven first by

server virtualization and more recently by cloud computing. This is

occurring up and down the IT stack, and this includes the Application

Delivery Controller or load balancing layer.

The Future is Software

• Server Virtualization

• Cloud Computing

• Software Switches

• Software Routers

• Software Firewalls

• Software Load Balancers

DIFFERENT TYPES OF

LOAD BALANCERS

Different Types of Load Balancers

Hardware Load Balancers

Proprietary Hardware

Proprietary Operating System

VS 1 VS 2 VS 3 VS 4 VS 5

Load Balancing Software

A Virtual Server (VS) is the configuration and resources needed to load-balance an application.

Different Types of Load Balancers

Virtualized Load Balancers

LB Soft

Proprietary/Commodity Hypervisor

Proprietary Hardware

LB Soft LB Soft LB Soft LB Soft

Prop OS Prop OS Prop OS Prop OSProp OS

VS 1 VS 2 VS 3 VS 4 VS 5

Different Types of Load Balancers

Virtual Appliance Load Balancers

LB Soft

VMware

Commodity Hardware

LB Soft LB Soft LB Soft LB Soft

Prop OS Prop OS Prop OS Prop OSProp OS

VS 1 VS 2 VS 3 VS 4 VS 5

Different Types of Load BalancersSoftware Load Balancers

Commodity Hardware

Linux

NGINX Plus

NGINX+

VMware

Commodity Hardware

NGINX+ NGINX+ NGINX+ NGINX+

Linux Linux Linux LinuxLinux

VS 1 VS 2 VS 3 VS 4 VS 5

VS 1 VS 2 VS 3 VS 4 VS 5

What is a Software-Based Load Balancer

• Runs on generic hardware/virtualization

• Available as a software installation

• Virtual load balancer ≠ software load balancer

WHY CHOOSE A

SOFTWARE LOAD BALANCER

Why Software-Based Load Balancing?

Flexibility

Run Anywhere

• Commodity hardware

• Hypervisor

• Containers

• Cloud

• The same software everywhere

Right Sizing

• Buy for what you need now

Buying a Hardware Load Balancer

0

5

10

15

20

0 1 2 3 4 5

Throughput

Years

Buying a Hardware Load Balancer

0

5

10

15

20

0 1 2 3 4 5

Throughput

Years

Buy for what you need now

0

5

10

15

20

0 1 2 3 4 5

Throughput

Years

N N

N N

N N

Right Sizing

• Buy for what you need now

• Buy hardware that matches your needs

Throughput vs. Features

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

L4 Load Balancing SSL Bulk Encryption Compression L7 Scripting, WAF

Hardware Load Balancer

Right Sizing

• Buy for what you need now

• Buy hardware that matches your needs

• Elasticity

Elasticity

0

5

10

15

20

Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun

Throughput

N N N N

N N N N N

Deployment Flexibility

• Rapid deployment

• Bare metal, VM, container, existing server

• Software is DevOps friendly

Deploying a Hardware Load Balancer

Place the order $$$

Wait …

Take delivery

Install & configure

Deploying a Software Load Balancer

on HardwarePlace the order $$

Get a server from inventory

Download the software

Install & configure

Internet

Multi-Tenancy

• True multi-tenancy is hard

• You can’t get true isolation – noisy neighbor

• Leads to feature restrictions

• Size for max load – under commit resources

Multi-Tenancy

Hardware LB

App 1

App 2

App 3

App 4 App 5

App 6

App 7

App 8

A Better Multi-Tenancy

• Multi-tenant using multi-instance

• Isolation

• Full feature availability

• Size for each application

Multi-Instance

App 1

App 2

App 3

App 4 App 5

App 6

App 7

App 8

N N N N N

N N

N NN N N

N N

N NN N

New Hardware Technologies

• Latest chipsets

• New chip architectures (Atom, ARM)

Objections

• You can’t get performance out of software

– The H/W ADC has an SSL accelerator card

– The H/W ADC has dedicated network ASICs

• You really can get performance out of software

What is NGINX?

Internet

N

Web ServerServe content from disk

Application ServerFastCGI, uWSGI, Passenger…

ProxyCaching, Load Balancing… HTTP traffic

Application Acceleration

SSL and SPDY termination

Performance Monitoring

High Availability

Advanced Features: Bandwidth Management

Content-based Routing

Request Manipulation

Response Rewriting

Authentication

Video Delivery

Mail Proxy

GeoLocation

Summary

• What you need

• Where you need it

• When you need it

A software load balancer lets you deploy:

Questions and Answers

Closing Thoughts

• 40% of the busiest websites use NGINX

• Check out the previous webinar on tuning at nginx.com

• Future webinars: nginx.com/webinars

• Blogs: nginx.com/blog

Try NGINX F/OSS (nginx.org) or NGINX Plus (nginx.com)