The load balancing vendor Barracuda recently announced Layer 7 capabilities and SSL offloading/acceleration, and the open source vendor loadbalancer.org recently gave up their anti-Layer 7 stance (although they still state that it’s slow on their web site, ironically on a page called “fud“) and added Layer-7 functionality. This basically means that Layer 4 load balancing-only companies have gone the way of the DeLorean.
I don’t know of any companies that don’t offer Layer 7 capabilities at this point, and if there are, they’d better get Layer 7 soon. Especially if Layer 7-capable devices don’t cost any more than non-Layer 7 devices, why get a Layer-4 only device?
This is especially important considering my recent post “A Load Balancer By Any Other Name…” and the email debate on the load balancing mailing list. Layer 4-only devices don’t really exist anymore, everyone has moved up the stack.
Layer 4 load balancing is dead. Long live Layer 7.
