Load Balancers
Load balancing aids application availability and scalability. There are two load balancing options in OnApp:
- Load balancer clusters
With this option, you specify which VSs (nodes) will participate in a load balancer cluster. Incoming traffic is distributed evenly between all the VSs added to a cluster – you still present a single host name to end users, but they actually access the cluster of VSs rather than a single end point. This helps application availability: if one VS fails, traffic is automatically routed to another in the cluster. You can add and remove cluster VSs as required.
- Autoscaling clusters
VS Autoscaling increases or decreases your VS capacity by automatically adding or removing nodes to a cluster. The cluster is scaled in (decreased) or out (increased) based on rules you specify in the Control panel. This aids application performance and scalability.
For instance, you can create a rule that will add 3 more nodes to a cluster if CPU usage has been more than 90% for the last 5 minutes; or rules that remove a node if there has been more than 256 MB RAM free for the last 20 minutes.