Tag: Load Balancing

What is lsyncd?

lsyncd is a rsync-based tool that monitors specified directories (including subdirectories) for updates and modifications, and then syncs those changes to a specified destination. It is a lightweight command application that is easy to install and configure using the popular Lua language.

What is Service Mesh?

A service mesh is an additional infrastructure layer that provides a means of communication between all services in a given application. It is typically deployed as a series of proxies alongside each service instance. Since the service mesh proxies are deployed alongside the application services and not as part of it, they are often referred to as sidecars. This means that as a whole, these sidecar proxies are a mesh network and an infrastructure layer separate from the application. A service mesh not only brokers communication between all services in an application but, since all requests, both internal and external, pass through it, it provides a means for handling many tasks that can be obfuscated away from the application.

Today we will demonstrate how to install Envoy Proxy on Ubuntu. 

Introduction

All online businesses need to account for growth. As a business receives more visitors to its site, the underlying infrastructure needs to scale to provide the same level of performance that the visitors are accustomed to. Horizontal scaling, the addition of more servers rather than increasing the power of the existing servers, is an easy way to build our web servers' ability to handle a more significant amount of traffic and protect us against hardware failure. Ensuring that the additional web servers have the same files and data is a potentially time-consuming and challenging task. Automating that task using free, open-source software, such as lsyncd, is a way to ensure that we have a safe, secure, and repeatable method of copying files from one server to another.

Load balancing and replicating multiple servers has a great array of benefits, though orchestrating and keeping them in sync can be very tricky. Here, we will walk through some of the load balancing options available, as well as setting up a very basic one-way replication sync between two or more servers behind a load balancer.

The hosting world’s bread & butter solution for providing high availability and redundancy is load balancing. There are many different use cases for a Load Balancer (LB). It is important to know how to effectively manage your LB configuration so that it performs optimally in your environment.  The proceeding article will review some of the common practices that, when adhered to, provide a smooth and seamless high availability website/application through the use of load balancing.

What is a Service Mesh?

A service mesh is a layer of communication and control between applications or microservices and the network stack they typically communicate over. This layer controls communication and helps microservices share data. This service-to-service interaction is governed by logic built into the service mesh layer. Simply put, microservices are small or partial applications, or individual functions, and the network stack is the physical networking layer.

In the past, load balanced setups have required dedicated networking equipment, which takes time and expertise to set up correctly. Liquid Web’s Cloud Load Balancer makes setup and configuration of a load balancer as easy as filling out a web form.

Load balancing is the distribution of a workload across many nodes. In the web hosting industry, it is typically used for balancing HTTP traffic over multiple servers acting together as a web front-end. For the sake of this article, we will focus on the balancing of HTTP and HTTPS traffic through a Zeus Load Balancer.