Distribute traffic across multiple origin servers with flexible steering policies to reduce latency and improve availability.
Use cases
|
Requirement |
Description |
Industries |
|
High service availability |
Network issues, server overload, or misconfigurations can degrade availability or cause outages, resulting in business losses. Load balancing lets you configure multiple origin server groups for disaster recovery. Health checks automatically isolate faulty servers and route traffic to healthy ones. |
Financial services, gaming, e-commerce, and digital entertainment. |
|
HTTP-based request routing |
Configure custom rules to route requests to different origin servers based on HTTP headers, URLs, URIs, and other request fields. |
Global news portals and online education platforms. |
|
Session persistence |
Route requests from the same user to the same origin server to maintain session state. |
Gaming and co-streaming. |
Benefits
A load balancer can serve as an origin for Edge Security Acceleration (ESA) domains and layer 4 proxy applications, with these features:
-
Disaster recovery: Configure multi-level primary and secondary origin servers. Traffic automatically fails over to secondary servers when the primary becomes unavailable.
-
Traffic distribution: Distribute requests across origin servers based on a specified ratio.
-
Health checks: Monitor origin servers with protocols like ICMP Ping, TCP, HTTP/HTTPS, and UDP, and remove faulty servers from rotation.
-
Custom routing rules: Route requests to origin servers based on HTTP request fields, such as headers, URLs, and URIs.
-
Session persistence: Route requests from the same user to the same origin server.
How it works
When you add your site to ESA, you can configure three server groups (A, B, and C) as origin servers in descending priority. Traffic goes to Server Group A by default. If A fails health checks, traffic fails over to B, then to C. If all groups are unhealthy, traffic defaults to C. The system uses ICMP Ping to detect and isolate unhealthy servers automatically.
Supported modes by DNS setup
Each load balancer is assigned a custom domain name. Supported features depend on your site's DNS setup.
|
DNS setup |
Supported modes |
Description |
|
If you connect your website to Edge Security Acceleration (ESA) in NS setup, ESA manages DNS resolution for your domain. To prevent service interruptions, you need to add all DNS records of the domain to ESA and update the nameservers to ESA assigned ones at your registrar. The DNS records can be imported at a time. |
|
|
CNAME-setup sites do not currently support direct DNS resolution. However, a load balancer domain can still serve as an origin for a domain or Layer 4 proxy application. |
If you connect your website to Edge Security Acceleration (ESA) in CNAME setup, you need to add a DNS record to map the domain that you want to proxy to the ESA assigned CNAME. This way, user requests destined for your domain can be forwarded to ESA points of presence (POPs). This enables content delivery acceleration, edge computing, and enhanced protection. |
Plan availability
|
Free |
Basic |
Standard |
Advanced |
Enterprise |
|
|
|
|
|
Contact sales for custom requirements |