Load Balancing
Overview
VergeCloud’s Load Balancer is designed to intelligently manage and distribute incoming traffic across multiple origin servers. This ensures high availability, stable performance, and consistently low response times for users across different regions. Acting as a smart traffic distribution layer in front of your infrastructure, it prevents any single server from receiving more load than it can handle and ensures that every request is routed to the best possible server at that moment.
The system continuously evaluates several factors such as server health, geographic proximity, real-time performance indicators, and your custom load distribution rules. Based on these signals, it decides the most suitable destination for each individual request. VergeCloud enhances traditional load balancing with two major capabilities: Active Health Check and Geo-Steering, both of which work together to maintain uninterrupted service.
Active Health Check performs automatic, real-time monitoring of server responsiveness. If a server becomes slow, returns unexpected status codes, or fails to respond, it is temporarily removed from traffic rotation until it recovers. This automated isolation protects your application from outages and degraded performance. It is especially vital for workloads that demand continuous uptime such as OTT platforms, e-commerce storefronts, multiplayer gaming backends, and SaaS applications that cannot afford service interruptions.
Geo-Steering adds another layer of intelligence by directing users to the nearest healthy server pool based on their physical location. This dramatically reduces latency and improves load times, particularly for global applications with user bases spread across continents. By ensuring that users connect to a server region closest to them, VergeCloud improves both speed and reliability during regular traffic as well as sudden spikes.
Together, these capabilities deliver fast content delivery, optimal resource utilization, and resilience during peak traffic or regional outages.
Key Concepts Explained
1. Pool refers to a collection of origin servers grouped together to handle traffic for a specific domain or subdomain.
2. Monitoring describes the automated evaluation of server health at regular intervals to determine whether it is available and performing within expected thresholds.
3. Traffic Routing refers to the decision-making logic that determines which pool or specific server should receive a user request.
4. Active Health Check is a real-time mechanism that sends periodic requests to servers, verifies their responsiveness, and automatically removes unhealthy servers from active rotation.
5. Geo-Steering is the method used to send users to the closest or most appropriate server pool based on geographic indicators such as country or region.
Real Usage Scenarios
A global e-commerce company can route European customers to a pool located in the EU, direct American customers to a US-based pool, and send Asian traffic to servers closer to that region. This reduces delays, results in faster page loads, and helps reduce issues like cart abandonment during peak sales.
A streaming or OTT platform benefits even more during events such as live match broadcasts or movie premieres, where request volume can spike suddenly. VergeCloud distributes this surge across multiple origins and isolates unhealthy servers instantly before they impact viewer experience.
Step-by-Step Feature and Field Descriptions
Load Balancing Management (Step 1)
The first step in enabling load balancing is to access the Traffic panel in your VergeCloud dashboard and navigate to the Load Balancing section. By selecting Create, you can define attributes such as the load balancer name, description, and the operating mode. VergeCloud supports two principal modes.
In Active Active mode, traffic is distributed among all healthy pools according to the geographic routing rules. This method ensures efficient distribution and is ideal for global applications.
In Active Passive mode, all traffic is directed to the primary pool unless it becomes unhealthy. If a failure occurs, traffic automatically shifts to the next available pool. This approach works well for applications that rely on a single primary region but still require a fallback pool for emergencies.
Pool Management (Step 2)
Once the load balancer is created, the next task is pool configuration. A pool consists of multiple origin servers identified by IP addresses or hostnames. You can assign a name, description, and choose the load distribution method.
Round Robin distributes incoming requests sequentially to each server, allowing even load sharing. Client IP Hash ensures that the same client is consistently connected to the same server, which is especially important for authenticated sessions, user dashboards, or game state persistence.
You may also enable the Origin Server Health Check feature within each pool. VergeCloud regularly tests server health using configurable endpoints and request types. If a server fails these tests, it is paused and removed from the rotation to guarantee uninterrupted service.
Traffic Routing (Step 3)
In this phase, geolocations are mapped to pools. For example, you may route Indian traffic to an Asia pool and US traffic to a North America pool. If a region is not explicitly mapped, the primary pool is used as the fallback. Geo-Steering significantly reduces latency since the nearest pool almost always provides faster responses.
Monitoring and Active Health Check (Step 4)
Monitoring is a crucial part of ensuring application resilience. Within the Edit Monitoring panel, you can configure the protocol, request path, HTTP method, acceptable response codes, and the regions from which monitoring nodes will test your servers. Results may place pools in a healthy, warning, or unhealthy state.
If monitoring is disabled, VergeCloud sends no checks and assumes all servers are healthy. In Non-Critical mode, health checks run normally and email alerts are sent for unhealthy servers, but traffic routing remains unchanged. In Critical mode, servers that fail health checks are automatically removed from distribution after alerts are sent.
It is essential to whitelist VergeCloud edge IPs within your firewall to avoid health check failures due to blocked traffic.
How to Add, Edit, or Use the Feature
All configuration steps follow a simple sequence. Create a load balancer, configure pools, assign geolocation rules, and fine-tune monitoring settings. You can modify or update any of these elements at any time from the VergeCloud dashboard.
API Reference
Automate Load Balancer configuration and management can use VergeCloud’s complete Load Balancer API. The API allows you to create and manage load balancers, configure server pools, add or remove origins, update routing settings, view health check details, and streamline traffic distribution directly through your automation pipelines.
You can integrate these endpoints into your CI/CD workflows, infrastructure scripts, or custom tools to fully control how traffic is routed across your origin servers.
Explore all available endpoints here: https://api.vergecloud.com/docs#tag/load-balancer
Testing and Validation
Both methods help validate whether load balancing and health checks are functioning correctly.
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