Session-persistent Load Balancing for Clustered Web Servers without Acting as a Reverse-proxy
Mohammad Hosseini, Amir Hossein Jahangir, Sina Daraby · 2021
A Load balancer is an essential component of a clustered web-server system which distributes requests among servers. Layer-4 load balancers process requests faster than Layer-7 ones, but they cannot provide session-persistent load balancing. On the other side, layer-7 load balancers, which are known as reverse-proxies, can direct all requests of an application-level session to the same server, but they impose a high processing cost due to processing requests at the application level. We propose a session-persistent load balancing approach which uses TLS session data instead of processing at the application level. It outperforms existing approaches in terms of transaction rate and response time.