Load Balancing
Overview
The system evaluates multiple factors—server health, geographic proximity, and load distribution rules—to determine the best destination for every request. VergeCloud enhances this setup with two key capabilities: Active Health Check and Geo-Steering.
Active Health Check continuously monitors server responsiveness in real time. If a server becomes slow or unresponsive, it is automatically removed from rotation until it recovers, preventing outages and improving reliability for applications that require continuous uptime, such as OTT platforms, e-commerce sites, gaming backends, and SaaS services.
Geo-Steering directs users to the nearest healthy server pool based on their geographic location, reducing latency and significantly improving the user experience for global audiences. Together, these features ensure fast content delivery, optimal resource utilization, and consistent performance even during peak traffic or regional load spikes.
Glossary
- Pool: A group of origin servers that work together to handle traffic for a domain or subdomain.
- Monitoring: The automated process of checking server health at regular intervals to ensure availability.
- Traffic Routing: The logic used by the load balancer to determine where incoming requests should be sent.
- Active Health Check: A real-time mechanism that tests server responsiveness and automatically removes unhealthy servers from traffic distribution.
- Geo-Steering: A method that directs users to the nearest or most appropriate server pool based on their geographic location.
Real Usage Scenarios
A global e-commerce website can send European traffic to an EU pool, US users to a US pool, and Asian traffic to a pool located nearby. This ensures faster page loads and reduces cart abandonment. An OTT or streaming platform can benefit even more severely during peak hours or live events, where heavy requests must be handled efficiently. With VergeCloud’s load balancing, streaming content can be served from multiple origin servers, while unhealthy nodes are automatically isolated without impacting viewers. Similarly, SaaS platforms can maintain service continuity during version upgrades or server maintenance by rerouting users seamlessly to alternate pools.
Step-by-Step Feature and Field Descriptions
Load Balancing Management (Step 1)
The first step in configuring load balancing begins under the Traffic menu of your VergeCloud dashboard. After navigating to the Load Balancing section and selecting Create, you can configure settings such as the load balancer name, description, and operating mode. VergeCloud supports two main methods. The Active-Active method distributes traffic among all healthy pools according to the assigned geolocations. The Active-Passive method prioritizes the primary pool, directing traffic there unless the pool becomes unhealthy, in which case traffic automatically shifts to the next available pool.
Pool Management (Step 2)
After establishing a load balancer, you must create one or more pools. A pool consists of multiple origin server IPs or hostnames. In the pool configuration, you can provide a name, description, and choose the load distribution method. VergeCloud supports two primary balancing methods. Round-Robin distributes requests in sequence, giving each server an equal opportunity to handle traffic based on their weight. Client IP Hash ensures that users are consistently routed to the same server based on their IP address, which is especially valuable for session-based workloads like gaming, authentication services, or logged-in user experiences.
If enabled, the Origin Server Health Check feature ensures that VergeCloud regularly tests each server in the pool. If any server begins to fail these checks, the system prevents it from receiving traffic until it recovers, ensuring uninterrupted service for users.
Traffic Routing (Step 3)
In this step, you assign geolocations to each pool so specific regions are directed to designated servers. For example, users in India can be routed to Pool A while users in Europe are connected to Pool B. If no pool is assigned for a region, the load balancer defaults to the primary pool. Geo-Steering significantly decreases latency by ensuring that users connect to the closest server geographically.
Monitoring and Active Health Check (Step 4)
Monitoring is the final step and one of the most critical. By selecting Edit Monitoring, you can fine-tune the behavior of Active Health Check. VergeCloud enables you to configure the protocol, path, HTTP method, expected response codes, and monitoring nodes’ regions. Monitoring results categorize your pools into healthy, warning, or unhealthy states. If monitoring is disabled, VergeCloud sends no health check requests to your origin servers. In Non-Critical mode, server health is checked and email notifications are sent for unhealthy servers but traffic routing is unaffected. In Critical mode, unhealthy servers are automatically removed from distribution after notifications are issued.
It is necessary to whitelist VergeCloud edge IPs within your firewall to ensure uninterrupted health check communication.
How to Add, Edit, or Use the Feature
You can configure load balancing by following the sequence outlined: create a load balancer, configure pools, assign geographic routing, and set up monitoring. All changes can be made directly through the VergeCloud dashboard.
Testing and Validation
Both methods help validate whether load balancing and health checks are functioning correctly.
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