My experience: some organisations have a network group, that is able to
understand application communication behaviour and do a very good job in
making most of these features available via there load balancer
appliances and then benefit from their central administration, GUIs etc.
On the other hand in some organisations there is a deep split between
the server/app guys and the network guys, and you will not succeed in
making the network use the high-level features of their gear.
So in principle most can be done on both sides, but often it's the
experience of the people, that decides on where to actually build the
solution.
I did both solutions successfully and even had companies move from on to
the other when they changed their organization.
I think it's not worth to technically discuss, where the features belong
to. In practise, it's not really a technical question.
Just my point of view.
Rainer
Brian Akins wrote:
Guy Hulbert wrote:
The point of contention was scalability ... from a human point of view
it is really annoying to have to solve a problem twice but from the
business pov, outgrowing your load balancer might only be a good thing.
Yes. But most load balancer can only do layer 7 load balancing.
Sometimes it is necessary to have very application specific "routing."
Also, in general, most hardware load balancers base their algorithms on
things such as response time. Sometimes, it is necessary to know the
general "health" of the backend servers.
