Kyle Lexmond, Facebook
Load balancing is often presented as a simple solution for difficult application problems, like providing redundancy and smooth blue/green application upgrades. But not all load balancers are created equal. Is a L7 load balancer better than an L4 one? What makes DNS a load balancing technique? Does using a CDN help?
This talk answers these questions and more. It covers 3 common variants of load balancing (L4, L7 and DNS) in a product agnostic manner, important properties of each variant, and why you would consider using them. It concludes with an overview of how Facebook uses all 3 variants to manage and control traffic flows globally.
Kyle Lexmond, Facebook
Kyle is a Production Engineer on the Traffic Applications team at Facebook Seattle, working to make sure requests from people get a 200 OK, not an error or vanishing into the ether(net).
Previously at Twitter and AWS, he focuses on simplifying systems and making them more resilient to failure, ideally fixing more things than he breaks.
Open Access Media
USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted after the event are also free and open to everyone. Support USENIX and our commitment to Open Access.
author = {Kyle Lexmond},
title = {Load Balancing Building Blocks},
year = {2019},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}