Service providers delivering cloud require a user-friendly solution to load balancing across their servers. At Flexiant, we continually aim to deliver against our service providers’ requirements, and so today we launch a fully integrated, multi-tenant Load Balancer as a Service.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator load balancers are deployed in redundant groups. These in turn can route traffic across backend servers according to various algorithms, such as round robin, or whichever server has the least number of connections on it.
What can you do with this?
With Flexiant, you have full flexibility over how to monetize this service; bill per incoming request, per GB of data transferred in or out, or even on a fixed charge basis if required.
But that’s not all. Many of the web applications that customers need to run on your cloud servers will have users located across the globe. In many cases, the workloads they are running will be highly latency-sensitive. An e-commerce site, for example, runs the very real risk of losing out on potential customers if they have long wait times for a transactions to complete. As a result, we have included our very own GeoDNS service in this feature, enabling your customers’ end users to be routed to the servers hosted closest to them.
Let’s say your customer’s servers for a given service are hosted on two clusters, one in the US and another in Singapore. With GeoDNS, users from, say, Canada would automatically be routed to the US data center, while users from Australia would be served content from the data center in Singapore. This ensures that latency is always kept to the minimum possible levels based on the servers available.
Use of our GeoDNS service is optional; your customer can always use their own GeoDNS service if they prefer, or, if all their servers are located in a single geography, they could opt for no GeoDNS at all.
That being said, using Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator’s built-in GeoDNS carries with it the added benefit of automatically health checking the load balancers, and removing from the group any appliances that are down. Regardless of whether or not Flexiant’s GeoDNS is used, all load balancers health check the backend servers, ensuring that traffic is only routed to those that are operational.
How does this benefit the service provider?
All of this can help you in a number of ways. You can broaden your market reach by being able to target customers with high availability requirements, as well as with multiple data centers and end users in multiple geographical locations. You have the opportunity for additional revenue streams from your existing markets. You can differentiate your services against the competition with a true value add solution that is fully integrated with the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) that you sell. Finally, selling solutions rather than commoditized IaaS can help you achieve far more effective customer lock-in.
How does this benefit my customers?
Your customers benefit from our Load Balancer as a Service by being able to horizontally scale their web application architectures on your cloud, easily and through the same UI as the rest of your cloud services that they consume – no more tedious configuration of virtual appliances required. This enables them to optimize the performance of these applications by ensuring that requests are always routed to servers that are operational, and that have the capacity required to deal with those requests. It also means that they can make the best use of the cloud servers they are paying for by distributing web traffic efficiently across these.
Security
For added security, our load balancer service requires domains to be authenticated by the domain owner; this prevents any potential disruption by another Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator customer. We also support SSL termination on the load balancers themselves, meaning that customers don’t have to pay as much for backend server resources.
Want to see this feature in action? Get in touch and we will give you a short demonstration. If you like what you see, let us know so we can get you benefiting from Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator as soon as possible.
