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Load balancers are available as enterprise (paid) and open-source options.
The load-balanced ADFS solution integrates well with both cloud services and on-premises deployments, delivering continuous availability.
GSLB intelligently directs traffic to the nearest and best-performing server using DNS responses.
Skudonet Community Edition
Skudonet Community Edition is an open-source load-balancing tool optimized for performance and scalability.
Built on Linux, it offers robust security, transparency, and customization flexibility.
Read more in ourSkudonet review.
Users can also submit support tickets for quick help from the support team.
HAProxy
HAProxy is a free, popular web connection load balancer software designed for high-traffic websites.
It scales efficiently, handling up to 2 million SSL requests per second and 100 gbps of forwarded traffic.
Its event-driven architecture ensures quick responsiveness to I/O events.
HAProxy is designed with robust security by default, ensuring that non-portable and unreliable functions are replaced for stability.
All the input data gets cleaned very early in the lower layers.
you could analyze traffic patterns, pinpoint problems, and identify opportunities to improve your app/websites performance.
Traefik Proxy
Traefik is a cloud native utility proxy and virtual load balancer designed for microservices and APIs.
It supports both Layer 4 (TCP) and Layer 7 (HTTP) traffic.
The Lets Encrypt integration is handy for those who want production-ready deployments, as it automatically handles certificate management.
It inspects your infrastructure, looks for relevant information, and automatically discovers which service serves which request.
Traefik enables you to configure health checks and automatically remove unhealthy servers from the pool.
This ensures service availability even during high traffic.
User review on Traefik Proxy
A.N.M.
The documentation isnt very clear, and I often find myself confused when using advanced features.
Debugging was also challenging because the logs were long and hard to understand.
Fixing these issues would make it so much better.
Gobetween
Gobetween is a flexible load balancer designed for microservice architectures.
Gobetween conducts routine health checks to monitor the status of backend nodes.
Additionally, users can create custom scripts for health checks.
It includes a built-in server-side discovery feature.
It enables access control through REST API or configuration files, allowing policies to either allow or deny traffic.
It also automates SSL certificate issuance and renewal through Lets Encrypt, ensuring secure communication.
It also enhances performance by serving precompressed files or compressing them on the fly.
you’re free to configure Round-Robin Load Balancing, ensuring traffic requests are distributed using a round-robin design.
Seesaw
Seesaw is a flexible load-balancing tool providing basic and advanced web link-balancing capabilities.
It supports Direct Server Return (DSR) and Anycast, enabling efficient traffic management.
It offers centralized configuration and supports multiple VLANs, making it ideal for complex web connection environments.
To create a load-balancing cluster, you require at least two Seesaw nodes.
The nodes can be virtual instances or physical machines.
All four interfaces are connected to the same Layer 2 internet.
Seesaw fully supports Anycast VIPs by dynamically managing their availability.
It advertises active Anycast VIPs and withdraws those that are unavailable.
After configuration, users can view the state of the Seesaw load balancer via the Seesaw command line interface.
In case of any issues, users can use components such asseesaw_watchdogandseesaw_healthcheckto troubleshoot and devisesolutions.
Cilium
Cilium is a powerful Layer 4 load balancer designed for cloud-native environments.
Cilium offers robust support for both north-south and east-west load-balancing strategies.
you’ve got the option to use Ciliums Cluster Mesh allows multi-cluster routing across on-premise and cloud environments.
This approach allows exposure of backends running in different clusters using a shared global service.
Balance
Balance by Inlab Networks is a lightweight yet powerful TCP proxy with round-robin load-balancing.
It distributes incoming traffic evenly by sequentially routing each request to the next available server.
Balance provides failover features to ensure service continuity by automatically switching to another server if the primary one fails.
It also performs regular health checks to monitor server status and detect potential issues.
Users can dynamically adjust Balances behavior via its simple command-line interface.
It supports IPv6, simplifying routing and enabling automatic IP address configuration through Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC).
MetalLB
MetalLB is a robust load-balancer designed specifically for bare metal Kubernetes clusters, utilizing standard routing protocols.
It automatically assigns a fault-tolerant external IP whenever a LoadBalancer service is added to your cluster.
MetalLB requires a Kubernetes cluster running version 1.13.0 or later, without built-in load balancing.
It offers two modes: Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Layer 2 (L2).
BGP is ideal for large-scale networks and data centers due to its scalability.
On the backend, MetalLB uses a FRR Mode that uses an FRR container to handle BGP sessions.
FRR mode is available for all users requiring BFD or IPV6 protocols.
It doesnt require external routers or advanced networking knowledge.
Keepalived
Keepalived is a routing software that offers high availability and load balancing for Linux systems.
Keepalived uses adaptive checkers to monitor the health of load-balanced server pools.
When a server becomes unreachable or unhealthy, traffic is automatically redirected to healthy servers.
Keepalived delivers high availability by leveraging VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol).
It integrates a series of hooks into VRRP, enabling fast, low-level protocol interactions.
Additionally, VRRP utilizes BFD (Bidirectional Forwarding Detection) for rapid web link failure detection.
Keepalived implementation is based on an I/O multiplexer that handles a multi-threading solid framework.
This I/O multiplexer handles all the events.
Advanced users can build Keepalived from the source tree if they have its associated libraries, autoconf and automake.
you’re free to use Keepalived frameworks independently or altogether to build resilient infrastructures.
Envoy
Envoy is an open-source edge and service proxy tailored for cloud-native applications and microservices.
As an L7 proxy and communication bus, Envoy is ideal for large, modern, service-oriented architectures.
It performs dynamic health checks and integrates service discovery to route traffic only to healthy servers.
Envoy load balances servers in a single place, making them available to any utility.
Envoy offers first-class support for HTTP/2 and gRPC for both incoming and outgoing connections.
Additionally, its robust API allows for dynamic configuration management.
It is highly flexible and configurable, so you’re able to adjust it to suit your needs.
Instead of a single monolithic process, NGINX operates through a collection of processes to scale beyond OS limitations.
The master process manages worker processes, while the workers handle tasks such as processing HTTP requests.
NGINX distributes incoming traffic using methods like round robin, least connections, and IP hash.
The IP hash method ensures requests from the same client are sent to the same server.
Advanced users can also implement session persistence and weighted load balancing for more control.
As traffic increases, more servers can be easily added to handle the load.
Whats next?
I would suggest trying a few on the list to see what works for your software and infrastructure.
And, below are some further solutions for your program performance and security.
Best Web app Firewall
Best API Gateway
Best Open Source Firewall
