No more fixed bandwidth Load Balancer! With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Flexible Load Balancing service, you are no longer restricted to fixed bandwidth load balancer shapes or scaling based only on the general traffic patterns. You can choose a custom minimum bandwidth of 10 Mbps and an optional maximum bandwidth of 8000 Mbps.
In this blog, I am going to cover a brief introduction of Oracle Cloud Load Balancing Service and Flexible Load Balancer and how to create them in the cloud console.
If you don’t have an Oracle Cloud Account, check out this blog for quick steps on How to Register For FREE Oracle Cloud Trial Account
Load Balancing Service
Load balancing is an integral component of your enterprise applications, responsible for managing network traffic. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) load balancing allows automated distribution of web requests across a fleet(or pool) of servers based on policies:
- Health Check Policy
- Load Balancing Policy
Check out this blog to know more about Health Checks In Oracle Cloud
OCI Load Balancing service allows you to create two types of load balancers:
- Public Load Balancer: This handles the traffic originating from the public internet.
- Private Load Balancer: This handles the traffic originating from within OCI or between on-prem and OCI connected over VPN or FastConnect
Read more in detail about Load balancing on our blog What Is Load Balancer In Oracle Cloud (OCI) & How To Create: Step By Step
Flexible Load Balancing
In today’s world, an important requirement for application is to scale up and down, fast and flexibly to meet flexible customer demands and at the same time control costs whenever possible. Load balancers are a mission-critical component and play an important role in achieving this goal. This is where comes the need for Flexible Load Balancers.
Earlier Oracle Cloud load balancing service supported fixed sizes of load balancers like 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 400 Mbps, or 8000 Mbps. With the flexible load balancer, there is no longer a fixed bandwidth load balancer shape or scaling based on the general traffic patterns. With the Oracle CIoud Infrastructure flexible load balancer, users can choose a custom minimum bandwidth and an optional maximum bandwidth between 10 Mbps and 8000 Mbps during load balancer instance creation.
Also Read: Our blog post on Private DNS.
How Does It Work?
Flexible Load Balancer allows you to select a minimum and maximum bandwidth anywhere between 10Mbps and 8000 Mbps. The minimum bandwidth is used when you have normal traffic in your application and provides an instant query response for your workloads. The maximum bandwidth is used for increased loads in traffic. The maximum bandwidth is optional and it is also used to limit the bandwidth in case of unexpected peaks in order to control the cost.
Check Out: Our blog post on Oracle Cloud Storage.
Creating Flexible Load Balancer
When you create a load balancer, you must specify the backend servers (Compute instances) to be included in each backend set and configure the listener. In this section, we will discuss the quick steps for creating a flexible load balancer assuming you have already created backend servers.
1. Go to the navigation menu, click on Networking, and click on Load Balancers.
Read More: About Oracle Network.
2. Click Create Load Balancer.
3. On the Add details page, enter a friendly name, Visibility type, select IP address type.
Also Check: Our blog post on OCI IAM.
4. Under Bandwidth, specify minimum and maximum bandwidth for the load balancer.
4. Click Next, add the Backend servers and configure the listener by specifying the type of traffic (HTTP, HTTPS, TCP) and the port number.
Once your Load balancer is created you will be able to see the status of Load Balancer as active.
Read More: About Oracle VPN Connect.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
By now, you must have a brief understanding of Oracle Cloud Load Balancing Services. Let’s take a look at some frequently asked questions, asked by trainees in our Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate training.
Q1. If one process is running on one instance and due to some reason that instance is no more active, does LB move to another instance and continue from where it failed?
Ans. No Load Balancer is just to balance your loads, for example, if one process failed or based on your Load Balancer policy your request will shift to another available instance.
Q2. The public Load balancer is just for Failover and not for balancing load? Active/Passive?
Ans. The public Load balancer is for the traffic coming from public internet and in order to balance the load for your application which is on the public internet, you will use Public Load Balancer
Q3. Can you explain more about IP Hash, please?
Ans. If you use IP Hash Load Balancer Policy, the load balancer routes requests from the same client to the same backend server as long as that server is available. IP Hash ensures that requests from a particular client are always directed to the same backend server, as long as it is available.
Q4. What are the examples of Round robin?
Ans. Round Robin is a simple load-balancing algorithm. It works best when all the backend servers have similar capacity and the processing load required by each request does not vary significantly.
Related/References
- What Is Load Balancer In Oracle Cloud (OCI) & How To Create: Step By Step
- SSL/TLS On Load Balancer In Oracle Cloud (OCI)
- Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificate In Oracle Cloud (OCI)
- Networking In Oracle Cloud (OCI): VCN, Subnet, Gateways, Peering, Transit Routing
- Traffic Management In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
- Health Checks In Oracle Cloud (OCI)
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