Load Balancing Software Overview

Load balancer software receives the data traffic from different sources and distributes it across data servers. Load balancing software also acts as a reverse proxy that retrieves data from servers and redirects it to the clients. Most of the popular load balancer software provides features for network traffic analysis, network configuration management, switch port and IP address management, remote network management, and firewall log management. 

How to choose a load balancing software?

Whenever planning to buy a software-based load balancer, consider these six focus points that can help you choose the right one:

• Identify immediate & long-term needs: Choosing a load balancer that optimizes traffic distribution to reduce server load is often the immediate need of any business. Whereas increasing performance, reducing single point of failure is a long-term requirement. Other factors to be considered are whether your data needs encryption and the kind of security implications.
• Calculate the anticipated load: Organizations today are using internet load balancer software to meet their data traffic targets. Meanwhile, some companies are overspending their resources on buying data space they don’t need. On the other hand, some firms under-buy space, which makes them quickly outgrow the solution they had once chosen. Therefore, to avoid a situation like that, you should invest in internet load balancer software that helps scale up and down with the changing traffic.
• High availability: The best load balancer software helps in reducing server load to maximize data flow. There are some companies that ignore business viability and only focus on minimizing server utilization, which doesn’t help the business. That's why it is important that you invest in load balancer software that offers high availability of data storage without using extra space.
• Security concerns: With load balancing software, as your ability to handle more traffic increases, the risk of inviting cyber threats also increases. It is important that you choose a load balancer that gives high priority to data security.
• Return on investment: While evaluating the ROI (return on investment) of a load balancer, compare the value of lost business against the worth that load balancer brings, which includes the cost of deployment, downtime estimation, etc.
• The total cost of ownership: To calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO), decision-makers shouldn't just consider the initial deployment cost. The ongoing expenditure and various other spendings like service contracts and software upgrades should also be taken into consideration.

10 Best Load Balancer Software Comparison

• NGINX Plus: NGINX Plus is a cloud‑based load balancing software that enables advanced monitoring and strengthens security controls. The load balancing software helps in scalability and supports debugging and the diagnosis of complex application architectures.
  • Platform support: It’s a load balancing software for Mac OS, Linux, Windows, and Web-based applications.
•  Avi load balancer: Avi load balancer can draw traffic very fast. It is highly scalable and can ensure a fast and secure application experience. The software load balancer can do 0 to 1 million SSL transactions per second. 
  • Platform support: It’s a load balancing software for Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and Web-based applications.
• HAProxy: This internet load balancer software is an open source proxy solution that uses Linux, Solaris, and Windows FreeBSD platforms. Its fast and reliable cloud monitoring system powers a few high traffic driven websites in the world. The system translates your messages over Syslog Protocol on UDP and TCP. Moreover, HAProxy helps improve cache.
  • Platform support: Load balancing software for Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, AIX
• Kemp LoadMaster: As a high performance virtual load balancing system, Kemp LoadMaster features server and application health monitoring, data compression and caching, automation-enabled API, TCP multiplexing, and more.
  • Platform support: Load balancer for Linux & Unix
• Loadbalancer.org: The load balancing software protects your clients against any possible security disruption and lets you focus on building business. It enables you to run applications at a Zero downtime rate and provides solutions that will help scale up your business.
  • Platform support:  Load balancing software for Windows 10 and Linux system
• ManageEngine OpManager: ManageEngine OpManager monitors wireless LAN controllers, firewalls, load balancers, servers, routers, storage devices, and every other device that has an IP address and is connected to the network. The best load balancer software for Windows 10/8/7 has a user-friendly, affordable internet load balancer solution.
  • Platform support: Load balancing software for Windows 10 and Linux servers
• Citrix ADC: A cloud-traffic controller, Citrix ADC analyses data traffic for intelligent optimization. The data distribution system is available as software and hardware tool that features single and multi-tenant devices. 
  • Platform support: The system works best for web applications
• Barracuda Load Balancer ADC: A software based load balancer, Barracuda ADC minimizes traffic congestion and provides protection from a list of system intrusions and cyber-attacks. It has a reputation of blocking more than 11 billion real-world attacks. The software offers advanced Layer 4 and Layer 7 load balancing. 
  • Platform support: Load balancing software for Windows and Linux-based systems.
• Incapsula: Incapsula’s cloud-based application guards any website against illegal resource access, cross-site scripting, sophisticated SQL injections, and another OWASP top 10 threats. 
  • Platform support: Load balancer for Windows, load balancing software Mac, and Linux platforms
• Total Uptime Cloud Load Balancer: Choose the type of IP source, and SSL sessions with Total Uptime Cloud Load Balancer, and distribute your traffic based on the lowest response time, least bandwidth, least connections, closest proximity, and more. This software-based load balancer also supports failover or disaster recovery.
  • Platform support: Cloud environments

Key Benefits of Software-Based Load Balancer Software

• Programmability: The load balancer system should be programmable so that it can be tweaked and changes can be made accordingly. Programmability allows you to run your own checks over the system to determine the system's efficiency. For example, checking if the application is running smoothly or how much time it is taking, etc. With programmability, you can always customize these things.
• Scalability: Load balancing software should be scalable in nature so that it can handle a large volume of traffic in real-time. Scalability is a key feature for the software-based load balancers, Scaling up of hardware-based load balancers is always challenging after a certain point due to the physical limitations of hardware devices.
• Reduced cost: Using cloud-based load balancers, you can distribute data traffic across various servers, at a reduced price without buying any hardware devices. Also, there are different cloud-based load balancer service providers who offer a low-cost platform for testing different applications.
• Application security: Data and application security is a key feature for load balancing software across all operating systems. Security is integral to the cloud ecosystem because it sits between the client and the server. Without having extra layers of protection, it runs the risk of causing a threat to both the client and the server.
• Deploy on-demand: A major advantage of software-based load balancers is that it can be deployed on client demand. It is a key feature as it helps upscale your current data requirement.

Types of Load Balancer Software

• Hardware-based load balancers: These are hardware devices that are designed to operate on an operating system that distributes data traffic over a cluster of application servers. To have the maximum performance out of these systems, operators keep customizing data traffic rules so that application servers are not overwhelmed.
• Cloud-based load balancer: Cloud-based load balancing refers to allocating client’s data over the cloud so that you can minimize the server utilization without compromising on the data. With a cloud load balancer, you can maximize a program’s performance and easily scale up or scale down your system to match your business requirements.
• Software-based load balancer: It is a clever technique wherein administrators route data traffic to different servers. With load balancing software, you can evaluate a client’s data requirement by examining application-level characteristics such as the content of the request, IP address, and HTTP header. Based on its findings, the load balancer application runs a check on the servers and assigns the data.