Load balancer

Load balancer are used to increase the efficiency and of application by decreasing the burden of servers and maintaining the network sessions. It is broadly classified into two types namely Layer 4 and Layer 7 balancers. Layer 4 balancers work upon the data available on network and transport layer protocols. The transport and network layer includes IP, TCP, FTP, UDP protocols. Whereas Layer 7 balancer works upon the data found in application layer protocol which includes HTTP protocol. This layer also transfers the traffic based on specific data such as HTTP headers, cookies, etc. Both these Layer 4 and Layer 7 balancers follows the scheduling algorithm such as Round robin, weighted round robin, least connections, least response time.