The Top 9 Load Balancing Software Solutions

A10 Networks specializes in providing server load balancing solutions, ensuring the security, consistency, and high availability of business applications in various multi-cloud environments. Thunder ADC solution is a high-performance and efficient load balancing solution that enables businesses to build and operate critical applications while reducing the total cost of ownership.

Key features of A10 Networks’ load balancing solution include high availability and performance with advanced layer 4-7 load balancing; intelligent traffic management for optimal traffic distribution; and application acceleration techniques to enhance performance. The comprehensive application security aspect of the solution includes a Web Application Firewall (WAF), protection against malware, malicious botnets, and DDoS attacks, as well as Single-Sign-On (SSO) enforcement.

The Thunder ADC solution is available in hardware and multiple software form factors to cater for a variety of environments, such as public, private, and container-based cloud setups. A10 Networks’ Harmony Controller provides unified management and orchestration for seamless integration and automation across multiple clouds.

A10 Networks prioritizes automation and analytics with centralized policy management, real-time per-app visibility, actionable analytics for faster troubleshooting, and support for 100% API operation. A10 Networks has served over 7,000 customers, including global enterprises, communications, cloud, and web service providers.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) distributes network traffic across multiple targets, ensuring improved application scalability and high availability. ELB supports various environments, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, microservices, Lambda functions, and appliances in single or multiple Availability Zones (AZs).

There are three types of load balancers to choose from based on specific application needs – Application Load Balancer for flexible application management, Network Load Balancer for extreme performance and static IP, and Classic Load Balancer for applications built within the EC2-Classic network. ELB offers enhanced security through Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and its associated security groups, allowing configuration for internet-facing or internal load balancers.

Elastic Load Balancing efficiently scales its request handling capacity in response to incoming traffic and can handle sudden surges in demand. ELB also conducts health checks on targets to make sure they are available, ensuring traffic is only routed to healthy instances. Other notable features include sticky sessions for routing requests from the same client to the same target, operational monitoring through Amazon CloudWatch metrics and AWS CloudTrail API call tracking, as well as delete protection to prevent accidental load balancer deletion.

Azure Load Balancer is a layer 4 load balancing solution that operates as a single point of contact for clients, distributing inbound flows to backend pool instances in either Azure Virtual Machines or Virtual Machine Scale Sets. It supports both public and internal (private) load balancers, which can provide outbound connections for virtual machines and manage private IP addresses, respectively.

Azure Load Balancer is designed to scale applications and ensure high availability. It provides low latency, high throughput, and can scale up to millions of flows for TCP and UDP applications. Key features include load balancing both internal and external traffic, increasing availability through distribution within and across zones, configuring outbound connectivity for Azure virtual machines, using health probes to monitor load-balanced resources, and enabling support for IPv6.

With Azure Load Balancer, businesses can access virtual machines through public IP addresses, load balance on multiple ports and IP addresses, and move internal and external load balancer resources across Azure regions as needed. The solution is secure by default and operates within a private and isolated virtual network.

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is a network traffic management solution designed to ensure applications are always reliable, secure, and optimized. It manages the traffic between clients and hosts and operates through a pre-configured virtual server that directs network traffic to the appropriate host based on server performance, security, and availability.

BIG-IP LTM offers important features such as maintaining high availability, improving user experience, securing customer data, and providing real-time operational intelligence. With static and dynamic load balancing, traffic steering and health monitoring available, BIG-IP LTM helps businesses maintain app availability and reliability.

To improve user experience, this software employs TCP optimization, caching, and supports emerging protocols for IoT clients, such as MQTT. It delivers industry-leading SSL performance and protection against DDoS attacks, while also offering data encryption, Perfect Forward Secrecy, and key protection functions.

Capabilities of BIG-IP LTM include SSL acceleration, real-time analytics, full elasticity, strong security, availability, and full proxy visibility. F5 application services are compatible with major cloud providers and can be integrated through marketplace offerings with various consumption options.

Google Cloud Load Balancing is a high-performance, scalable solution for managing traffic on Google Cloud. It offers cross-region load balancing with automatic multi-region failover, instantly reacting to changes in user traffic, network conditions, and backend health. Being fully distributed and software-defined, it can be applied to all types of traffic, including HTTP(S), TCP/SSL, and UDP.

Cloud Load Balancing supports various load balancing types such as HTTP(S) load balancing; this balances traffic across multiple backend instances, in multiple regions, using a single global IP address. With its seamless autoscaling feature, it can handle large spikes in traffic by diverting it to other regions. Other key features include TCP/SSL/UDP load balancing with scalable Layer 4 load balancers, SSL offload for centralized SSL certificate management and decryption, and advanced support for IPv6 global load balancing, WebSockets, user-defined request headers, and protocol forwarding for private VIPs.

The platform also provides Cloud CDN integration, allowing users to optimize application delivery with just a single checkbox. Users are able to access metrics to understand app and system services performance better. Google Cloud Load Balancing supports over 1 million queries per second, ensuring optimal performance for all businesses.

F5 NGINX Plus combines the functionalities of a load balancer, reverse proxy, web server, and content cache. It adds enterprise-grade features to the NGINX Open Source such as high availability, active health checks, DNS system discovery, session persistence, and a RESTful API. NGINX Plus is designed for modern app infrastructure and development teams who require advanced monitoring, strengthened security controls, or Kubernetes container orchestration capabilities.

NGINX Plus ensures scalable and reliable high availability as well as offering monitoring features for debugging and diagnosing complex application architectures. The software actively checks the health status of upstream servers while providing an integrated live activity monitoring dashboard for a single-pane view of the application environment. Connection and request limiting, TLS 1.3 support, dynamic certificate loading, and JWT authentication help to reduce security breaches and limit exposure to malicious users. The optional NGINX App Protect WAF enhances the security of modern apps and APIs.

The software’s high-performance load balancing capabilities include session persistence, active health checks, and dynamic reconfiguration without requiring a server restart. It manages API traffic alongside regular web traffic and adjusts to different API gateway models. As a reverse proxy, NGINX Plus offers session persistence, caching, and multiple algorithms to maximize speed and capacity. Additionally, it integrates seamlessly with the Azure ecosystem as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering, addressing various deployment scenarios and supporting the migration of existing NGINX configurations to the cloud.

Kemp Technologies, a leading provider of load balancing solutions, offers the Kemp LoadMaster to ensure high availability and security for essential applications and services. The product’s load balancing solutions and application deployment templates cater to a variety of vendors and sectors, delivering high performance and secure workload management.

LoadMaster provides maximum reliability and availability for virtual applications and desktops from Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, and Parallels. It also optimizes object storage and offers web application firewall (WAF) for ongoing protection of web apps and APIs against common exploits. Additionally, the solution efficiently manages always-on VPNs and public cloud applications.

Kemp LoadMaster enhances overall security with application protection features, including web API and application protection against zero-day and common exploits, zero-trust network access, as well as pre-authentication and single sign-on capabilities. It also simplifies SSL/TLS management by offloading encryption overhead and streamlining compliance and certificate lifecycle management.

Kemp Technologies’ products are trusted by leading brands, with more than 100,000 deployments worldwide. Their range of load balancing/ADC options includes hardware LoadMaster, virtual LoadMaster, and cloud LoadMaster, providing flexible and high-performance solutions for any environment.

Traefik is a modern reverse proxy and load balancer with over 3 billion downloads. It simplifies networking complexity and assists in designing, deploying, and operating applications in various environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Traefik automatically configures itself through service discovery, integrating with existing infrastructure components and dynamically adapting to the services.

Capable of handling complex deployments, Traefik supports all major protocols and can be flexibly managed using its middlewares for load balancing, rate-limiting, circuit breakers, mirroring, and authentication. It intercepts and routes incoming requests to the corresponding backend services and offers SSL termination, along with automatic certificate generation when used with an ACME provider.

Traefik can be employed in various scenarios, such as load balancing to control upstream service loads, an API gateway for offloading cross-cutting concerns, a Kubernetes Ingress controller, and efficient certificate management. The software integrates with every major cluster technology and offers built-in support for top distributed tracing and metrics providers. For enterprise capabilities, Traefik Enterprise delivers high availability, scalability, and security features along with support from the core team.

VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) is a solution designed for enterprises deploying software-defined networking (SDN). The NSX ALB provides seamless integration with VMware NSX, delivering flexibility, agility, speed, automation, elastic scale, and cost effectiveness for application networking across L2-L3 and L4-L7 layers.

The NSX ALB features an application services fabric that synchronizes with the NSX controller in real time. This enables automated provisioning of elastic load balancing in the SDN environment and provides real-time analytics for applications deployed on top of the VMware NSX environment. In addition, it monitors, scales, and reconfigures application services according to changing performance requirements.

By integrating with VMware NSX, NSX ALB simplifies troubleshooting and enhances visibility with real-time insights, predictive autoscaling, and developer-friendly automation. Key benefits of this integration include multi-cloud load balancing, complete isolation and multi-tenancy, end-to-end visibility, comprehensive analytics, and predictive autoscaling of resources.

NSX ALB also supports multiple hypervisors in a VMware Cloud environment, allowing for fully automated, one-click deployment of NSX integrated load balancing services. Integration with VMware vCenter offers added features, such as network, pool member, and server configuration discovery, as well as horizontal autoscaling of load balancers on VMware NSX.