Global and Local Load Balancing

We'll cover the following...

Introduction
Global server load balancing
- Load balancing in DNS
- The need for local load balancers
What is local load balancing?

Introduction

Load balancing operates at two distinct scales: global and local.

Global server load balancing (GSLB): Distributes traffic across multiple geographic regions.
Local load balancing: Distributes traffic within a specific data center to improve resource efficiency and server utilization.

The following sections detail these techniques.

Global server load balancing

GSLB intelligently forwards global traffic to the optimal data center. Decisions are based on user location, server capacity, and data center health. For example, if a data center experiences a power or network failure, GSLB reroutes traffic to an active location.

GSLB also enables automatic zonal failover. This service can be ...