We’ve had a busy few months in the cloud team. In March this year, we launched the virtual network-backed Cloud product – giving customers the opportunity to use a private internal network to communicate between cloud instances. The advantages are obvious – free data traffic, easy scaling, and protected private traffic within your cloud. After the release, we worked on adding a load balancing functionality to the virtual network and software-defined firewall to make it easier for customers to balance and scale traffic. Last Wednesday, we released this functionality to all our Public Cloud customers – giving them the option to add a load balancer to their infrastructure via our Customer Portal.
A load balancer can help scale infrastructure by dividing incoming traffic between the cloud instances in the virtual network. The load balancer can be configured via our Customer Portal to use various algorithms to balance the traffic in the most effective manner. Using a simple setup, the load balancer will forward connections on a round-robin basis, going through each assigned instance in turn. You can also build more advanced setups using the source-based and least-connections mechanisms. When balancing traffic to web-based applications, there are various sticky policy settings to make sure the same web server continues to handle the requests for a specific user. Of course, all of these settings can be changed and fine-tuned to your heart’s content.
In terms of the billing model, we chose to be transparent and simple – we only charge for the load balancer, not for the amount of connections or data traffic. Any data traffic used will be subtracted from the existing data packs without additional charges.
As I wrote way back when we launched our new cloud platforms, we’ll continue to develop and add features that are important to you. If you have any suggestions for other features that you would like to see, be sure to let us know!