Load Balancer

Load balancers play a critical role in scaling applications in the cloud. Load balancers distribute the incoming traffic to several web server or application server nodes, or clusters and provide a mechanism to scale applications based on the workload. Unlike on-premise load balancers, cloud applications use software load balancers.

The CumuLogic platform provides a specialized, low cost and scalable load balancer on premise, on any Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud or VM pool. The CumuLogic Load Balancer offers all the features of an on-premise load balancer: easy deployment, full management, automatic node discovery for managed applications. CumuLogic Load Balancer enables you to achieve even greater fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the appropriate amount of load balancing capacity needed in response to incoming application traffic. The CumuLogic load balancer detects unhealthy nodes and automatically reroutes traffic to healthy nodes until the unhealthy nodes have been recovered.

With the CumuLogic load balancer, you can build and deliver a fully managed and highly available “Load Balancer-as-a-Service,” enabling the design of application architectures to fit specific availability, scalability and performance needs.

CumuLogic Elastic Load Balancer is integrated with the CumuLogic platform for developers to deploy any language application and scale it using the load balancer service.

Features

Features supported by the CumuLogic load balancer vary depending on the load balancer engine selected. Below are some common features:

Provisioning – Single-click or single-API call to provision the desired load balancer instance sizing it with configuration and performance parameters, and rules for auto update and patches.

Monitoring – Visibility into key functional and operational metrics of the load balancer engine and instance, including CPU, memory, I/O, network traffic, and response time.

Recovery – Automated recovery of load balancer from a service or instance failure. In the event of a service failure, the service will recover seamlessly and will re-provision a fully configured load balancer instance to replace the failed instance.

Automated Software Patching – Optional feature to apply minor updates and patches to the load balancer engine. Users can choose when the updates are to be performed based on the application maintenance downtime.

Optimization – Users can modify the performance parameters to suit the application workloads in real-time and in most cases without rebooting or shutting down the running load balancer instances.

Benefits

Single-click deployment: new load balancer instances can be quickly provisioned either using the user interface or a single API call. The load balancer service can be launched separately and then bound to a running application or can be orchestrated to launch during application deployment.

Low TCO: load balancer instances are fully managed and monitored, eliminating most manual tasks and substantially lowering the cost of application operations.

Security at multiple levels: load balancer instances are secured using the firewall settings and security groups of the chosen IaaS cloud, allowing users to control remote access to all load balancer instances. Additionally, load balancer instances can be configured to use only secured connections.

Any cloud: CumuLogic’s platform abstracts the underlying APIs of the IaaS cloud or vSphere environment, allowing users to deploy the platform and the load balancer on any supported private or public cloud.

Autoscaling: for CumuLogic platform managed-applications, CumuLogic’s load balancer will automatically adjust the load balancing configurations to match the autoscale up/down events in the application cluster.

Managed node failures: the CumuLogic load balancer can detect unhealthy load-balanced instances, marking the node and automatically spreading the traffic across the remaining healthy nodes.

Improved fault-tolerance for your application: the load balancer can automatically distribute traffic across multiple nodes and multiple datacenters to ensure that only healthy nodes receive traffic.

Management access: CumuLogic’s load balancer provides full management access via a UI console as well as RESTful APIs.

Working with CumuLogic Load Balancer

Launching a Load Balancer Instance – CumuLogic Load Balancer can be used to launch load balancer instances using the User Console or a simple set of API. Select the target cloud, size of the instance and launch your load balancer. You can also configure the load balancer parameters and customize the preferences for update maintenance time windows. Once you have launched a load balancer instance, you can configure it to load balance existing application/nodes. You need to provide application context, HostName/IP and port numbers of the nodes to load balance.

Creating and Applying New Load Balancer Parameter Groups – Parameter groups allow users to optimize the performance of the load balancer for specific workloads. You can easily create a new parameter group from a parameter family group of the engine and modify the selected parameters, and apply that parameter group to your load balancer instance. You can apply a parameter group to running instances without requiring a restart of the instance or start a new load balancer instance with new parameter group.

Monitoring and Optimizing – You can use monitoring metrics and charts to identify any potential issues with your load balancer instance. As needed, you can edit the desired performance parameters by using parameter groups.

Enabling SSL – You can enable SSL on CumuLogic Load Balancer by selecting the “Enable SSL” action. You can enable SSL with self-­‐‑signed certificate or CA certificates. To enable self-­‐‑signed certificate, just click on “Enable Anonymous,” otherwise you can generate and download a CSR, get it signed and then apply the certificate and key to enable SSL.

Please refer to CumuLogic Load Balancer Overview Guide for more information.

Use Cases

Applications with Large Footprint

With the CumuLogic load balancing service your applications can be distributed horizontally across multiple nodes, helping you achieve greater fault tolerance while providing required performance by seamlessly distributing workloads across all nodes.

Application with Dynamic Scalability Requirements

Load balancers work in a synergistic manner with our middleware components, helping distribute the workloads so that applications can scale up and down in response to incoming application traffic.

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