The emergence of the cloud and modern, fast corporate networks demands that you perform judicious balancing of computational loads. Practical Load Balancing presents an entire analytical framework to increase performance not just of one machine, but of your entire infrastructure. Practical Load Balancing starts by introducing key concepts and the tools you'll need to tackle your load-balancing issues. You'll travel through the IP layers and learn how they can create increased network traffic for you. You'll see how to account for persistence and state, and how you can judge the performance of scheduling algorithms. You'll then learn how to avoid performance degradation and any risk of the sudden disappearance of a service on a server. If you're concerned with running your load balancer for an entire network, you'll find out how to set up your network topography, and condense each topographical variety into recipes that will serve you in different situations. You'll also learn about individual servers, and load balancers that can perform cookie insertion or improve your SSL throughput. You'll also explore load balancing in the modern context of the cloud. While load balancers need to be configured for high availability once the conditions on the network have been created, modern load balancing has found its way into the cloud, where good balancing is vital for the very functioning of the cloud, and where IPv6 is becoming ever more important. You can read Practical Load Balancing from end to end or out of sequence, and indeed, if there are individual topics that interest you, you can pick up this book and work through it once you have read the first three chapters. What you'll learn * Judge network load balancing algorithms and when to use them * Plan your network for optimal load balancing performance * Configure single servers to take advantage of modern load balancing software * Learning to use load balancing software like HAproxy, STunnel etc. * Become familiar with implications of IPv6 and the cloud * Improve SSL throughput and seamless application cookie insertion Who this book is for Network engineers, developers and IT managers. Table of Contents Part I: Getting Started 1. Introduction 2. How websites work: what makes them slow 3. Content Caching: keeping the load light 4. DNS based load balancing 5. Content Delivery Networks 6. Planning for Performance and Reliability Part II: Load Balancing Essentials 7. Essential concepts you need to know 8. HTTP load balancing 9. Database load balancing 10. Load balancing your network connection 11. SSL Load Balancing Part III: Load balancing situations 12. Clustering the Load Balancers for High Availability 13. Load balancing in the cloud 14. IPv6: Implications and concepts 15. Where to go next...Appendix 1: Common Terms and Concepts

作者简介：

Peter Membrey

是获得认证的IT专业人员，拥有15年以上使用Linux和开源方案的实战经验。他17岁就通过了RHCE（Red Hat认证工程师）认证，成为最年轻的认证得主，还曾有幸为Red Hat工作，撰写过介绍开源方案的著作。

EelcoPlugge

本科毕业后就一直对信息安全领域很感兴趣。他曾在McAfee担任数据加密专家。现在，他在利物浦大学攻读信息安全硕士学位，并利用零散时间写书。他持有多个专业证书，并热衷于Linux、网络安全和加密数据等诸多技术方面。

David Hows

来自澳大利亚，以优异成绩毕业于信息与通信技术专业。他热衷系统性能优化和系统安全，并一直坚持在这个枯燥的领域工作。