Considering the wide range of services that use web servers, and the unpredictability of the load placed on them, designing and implementing a robust web server infrastructure can be challenging. Web server infrastructure can be designed, delivered, and managed more easily using Kemp load balancer between web servers and clients.
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HTTP – Apache Load Balancer
Developed by Apache Software Foundation (AFS), Apache HTTP Server offers free and open source software for Web servers. More than 100 million websites have been served by Apache HTTP Server since its release. It is estimated that it served 39% of all active websites and 35% of the top million sites as of August 2018.
You must download the Apache modules mod proxy and mod proxy balancer to create an Apache load balancer. Apache load balancer can satisfy the needs of some implementations, but the level of programming knowledge and manipulation required for it to be optimized means it isn’t appropriate for every situation. To load balance enterprise websites and applications, dedicated proprietary hardware/virtual load balancers such as Kemp LoadMaster are used.
The following are some benefits of this approach:
- Optimized for specific applications
- An Application Delivery Controller with full Layer 4-7 functionality
- An intuitive user interface and deployment templates
- Application delivery and load balancing at Layers 4-7
Clients’ traffic is intelligently distributed among multiple servers by a load balancer without the clients having to know what number of servers are in use or how they are configured. It provides additional security, performance, resilience, and simplifies scaling your website due to its placement between the clients and the servers.
Also read: https://aka.ms/remoteconnect | How to Fix
In addition to distributing traffic among servers, load balancers perform the following tasks:
- Proxy server HTTP reverse
- Algorithms for optimisation of traffic and routing
- Web server load can be reduced by caching images
- Caching of content
- The compression process
- Rewriting and switching content
- Server load is further reduced with SSL encryption/decryption.
- SSO (single sign-on), so users don’t have to log in each time they switch servers
- DNS Failover and GEO (GSLB)
- Persistence of cookies
- Proxy HTTP/2
- Firewall for web applications (WAF)
What it does
A load balancer placed between a web server and a user handles requests for access. Service domain names are associated with public addresses for load balancers.
Clients request access to the web servers through the load balancers. Clients do not directly interact with the back-end servers, but instead the load balancers do. In this way, the back-end servers are protected from attack because they can only connect to the LoadMasters through secure connections.
Load balancers are ideally located between web servers and clients to help secure and protect back-end content servers since they sit in the middle of the logical chain. A comprehensive Web Application Firewall is included in Kemp LoadMaster. Combined with traditional network firewalls, this system greatly boosts the security of the network border between the Internet and web servers.
Additionally, the Kemp LoadMaster load balancers can replace the discontinued Microsoft Forefront threat management gateway (TMG) product in terms of network security. A Kemp edge security pack is a supported alternative to Forefront TMG when deployed on LoadMaster.
Now is the time to upgrade
With Kemp LoadMaster load balancers deployed on your web servers, you will improve your web service’s performance, security, reliability and manageability.
Kemp LoadMaster improves your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) footprint on the web, and makes it easier to monitor and manage. LoadMasters will deliver a unified web presence by aggregating multiple back-end services and servers for search engines and other web crawlers.
