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

作者簡介：

Peter Membrey

是獲得認證的IT專業人員，擁有15年以上使用Linux和開源方案的實戰經驗。他17歲就通過瞭RHCE（Red Hat認證工程師）認證，成為最年輕的認證得主，還曾有幸為Red Hat工作，撰寫過介紹開源方案的著作。

EelcoPlugge

本科畢業後就一直對信息安全領域很感興趣。他曾在McAfee擔任數據加密專傢。現在，他在利物浦大學攻讀信息安全碩士學位，並利用零散時間寫書。他持有多個專業證書，並熱衷於Linux、網絡安全和加密數據等諸多技術方麵。

David Hows

來自澳大利亞，以優異成績畢業於信息與通信技術專業。他熱衷係統性能優化和係統安全，並一直堅持在這個枯燥的領域工作。