Load Balancing

North-South Type Load Balancing

North-South type load balancing refers to load balancing traffic between the external network (e.g., internet) and the internal network (e.g., data center). It is primarily used to distribute incoming client requests across multiple servers within a data center.

Here are some key characteristics of North-South type load balancing:

1. Client-facing: The load balancer sits between the clients and the servers, receiving incoming requests from clients and routing them to appropriate backend servers.
2. Scalability: It helps distribute client traffic evenly across multiple servers, ensuring high availability and preventing overload on any particular server.
3. Traffic optimization: It can perform functions like SSL termination, content caching, and compression to optimize the flow of traffic between clients and servers.
4. Protocols: It typically supports various protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, and TCP/IP for handling different types of client requests.

East-West Type Load Balancing

East-West type load balancing, on the other hand, focuses on load balancing traffic within the internal network itself, typically between different servers or services within a data center or cloud environment.

Here are some key characteristics of East-West type load balancing:

1. Server-to-server communication: It handles traffic between different servers or services within the same data center or cloud environment instead of managing external client traffic.
2. Microservices architecture: East-West load balancing is essential in modern microservices-based architectures where multiple interconnected services need to communicate with each other.
3. Service discovery: It often involves service discovery mechanisms to identify available services and route traffic to specific instances.
4. Dynamic scalability: East-West load balancing allows for horizontal scaling by distributing traffic across multiple instances of a service as per demand.
5. Container orchestration: With the rise of containerization and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, East-West load balancing plays a crucial role in routing traffic between containers.

In summary, while North-South type load balancing focuses on distributing external client traffic across multiple servers, East-West type load balancing handles the internal traffic flow between servers or services within a data center or cloud environment.