Load Balancer as a Service in Cloud Computing

Abstract

The explosive growth of cloud computing in recent years has led to a massive increase in both the amount of traffic and the number of service requests to cloud servers. This growth trend of load poses serious challenges to the cloud load balancer in efficient balancing of the load, already a daunting job. The cloud load balancing is a highly researched field where numerous solutions to balance load have been proposed. Unfortunately, no research papers provided a comprehensive review focusing Load Balancer as a Service (LBaaS) model. In this paper, we first understand the concepts of load balancing, its importance and desired characteristics in cloud. Then we provide complete review on the existing load balancing strategies, their strength, shortcomings and a comparative study. Finally, we presented load balancer as a service model adopted by the major market players, and our observation, future needs and challenges.