royans

A single server, today, can handle an amazing amount of traffic. But sooner or later most organizations figure out that they need more and talk about choosing between horizontal and vertical scaling. If you work for such an organization and also happen to manage networking devices, you might find a couple of loadbalancers on your desk one day along with a yellow sticky note with a deadline on it. Loadbalancers, by definition, are supposed to solve performance bottlenecks by distributing or balancing load between different components its managing. Though you would normally find loadbalancers in front of a webserver, a lot of different individuals have found other interesting ways of using it. For example I know some organizations have so much network traffic that they can't use just one sniffer or firewall to do their job. They ended up using some high end loadbalancers to intelligently loadbalance network traffic through multiple sniffers/firewalls attached to them. These are rar