How To Be A Load Balancing Expert With F5 Courses

This course takes you through the ins-and-outs of the basic load balancer: how it works, how to configure it, and what to do when it doesn't work.

What's a load balancer?

A load balancer is an application server that serves applications for users. These applications are generally of the web type, but it's easy to think of load balancers as just a way to handle many very high-bandwidth web applications.

The load balancer can be very powerful - it can serve applications that are distributed across many different servers, and it can fail gracefully when one server falls over and doesn't support a particular application. That last part is really important, because when a web application fails, the whole application goes down with it.

By understanding load balancers, you can quickly and effectively move your existing applications to more modern technologies, like web servers. This means more robust applications, as well as security, reliability, and scalability benefits.

By learning load balancers, you'll be better prepared to deploy new applications, and you'll have the knowledge to prevent problems before they happen.

The web

We're now at the point where most websites are built to work with very fast and fast-growing web applications. Websites that used to be based around the venerable SQL Server, ASP.NET, Java Web Server, or the less powerful PHP, JavaScript, and Ruby on Rails web frameworks are now dominated by a more modern array of more powerful and flexible web servers.

Mongols and Apache, for example, have fast networking and database servers that can support web applications very well, while Ruby on Rails, PHP, and JavaScript have ever more powerful and flexible web frameworks, such as Rails, jQuery, and Node.js that have very similar pros and cons.

Learn the basics of web servers

Many web servers, such as Apache, PHP, and the newer high-performance PHP applications, are simple to set up and deploy, and they provide a way for a web developer to build a web application that does its best to serve the web well. The problem, however, is that with any web application there are always going to be situations where things don't work as well as they should. There are always going to be corners that can be cut when designing a web application, and there are always going to be people who try to customize web applications for personal use.

These web applications don't just fail, though. They can go quite wrong. Because of that, web applications tend to require a load balancer that is highly available and able to handle connections with low latency, and usually that load balancer needs to be heavily patched to handle security problems.

You can look around the web and find loads of tutorials and blog posts about how to set up a load balancer, and that's great. This is one of the fastest growing parts of the web server software ecosystem. You can also go straight to vendors like Vultr, F5, and IronPort and find loads of information about load balancers. That is great.

The web is a complex system. When something goes wrong, it is extremely difficult for someone to fix it. That's what's so great about load balancers. They are simple and straightforward to configure, and you can add, update, and fix many of the problems that the web system can present to a load balancer in very short periods of time.

Read the beginner's guide to web servers

I'll leave the introduction to web servers for now, but I strongly recommend that you take some time to read the web server beginner's guide to learn the basics of web servers, and especially to learn about how to make your web applications fail gracefully when they don't work as well as they should.

To cover a large number of different load balancer scenarios, the F5 load balancer course takes you through everything you need to know about web servers.

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