Load balancers are critical infrastructure components that distribute traffic across multiple servers, ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, and optimal performance. A properly configured load balancer can handle millions of requests per day while providing seamless failover and zero-downtime deployments. This comprehensive guide explores load balancer architectures, configuration strategies, and best practices for production environments.
High availability load balancing architecture
Understanding Load Balancing
Load balancing distributes incoming network traffic across multiple backend servers to ensure no single server becomes overwhelmed. This improves application responsiveness, availability, and scalability[1].
HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 represent significant evolutions in web protocols, offering substantial performance improvements over HTTP/1.1. With major browsers and CDNs supporting both protocols, now is the time to implement them. This guide explores the technical details, implementation strategies, and performance optimizations for HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.
HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 modern web protocols
Understanding HTTP Protocol Evolution
The evolution from HTTP/1.1 to HTTP/3 represents fundamental changes in how browsers and servers communicate[1].
Choosing between Apache and Nginx is one of the most important architectural decisions for web infrastructure. Both are powerful, mature web servers, but they excel in different scenarios. This comprehensive comparison explores their architectures, performance characteristics, and use cases to help you make the right choice.
Modern web server architecture
Architectural Differences
The fundamental difference lies in how each server handles connections[1].
Apache’s Process-Based Model
Apache uses a process or thread-per-connection model:
Nginx has become the web server of choice for high-traffic websites, serving over 40% of the top 10,000 websites globally. Its event-driven architecture and low memory footprint make it ideal for modern web applications. This guide explores advanced Nginx configuration techniques and performance optimization strategies for production environments.
High-performance Nginx web server configuration
Understanding Nginx Architecture
Nginx uses an asynchronous event-driven architecture, fundamentally different from Apache’s process/thread-per-connection model. This design enables Nginx to handle thousands of concurrent connections with minimal memory usage[1].
