Load Balancing Digest

Barracuda sent me this press release, announcing a new link load balancer product (allowing an SMB to make use of multiple connections to the Internet).

Barracuda Networks Launches Barracuda Link balancer
New Product Line Routes and Manages Traffic Across Multiple Internet Connections

INTEROP NY, New York, Sept. 17, 2008 – (Booth # 847) Barracuda [...]

Apologies for the LOLcatspeak.  I’m incapable of helping myself.
The driving force behind Layer 7 persistence (keeping an individual user tied to a specific server in a server group based on HTTP headers instead of IP address) was the dreaded AOL Megaproxy issue.  AOL had the nasty little tendancy of routing all web traffic through a [...]

I saw this on Slashdot today, where a bunch of hackers developed a tool for stealing session IDs in Gmail.  By default, gmail authentication is encrypted, but the rest of your session is not.  In the requests that you send to gmail is included a session ID cookie, which is in the clear.  With your [...]

I was doing my obessive-compulsive reloading of Digg’s main page, and came accross this article on load testing with open source tools.  Good read.

So, when you’re not looking, stuff happens.  I turn my head for a minute, and I come to find Foundry Networks gets bought by Brocade.  Ok, not bought yet, but in definate agreement to. Also, one of my favorite bloggers, Fake Steve Jobs, calls it a blog and starts posting under his real name.
I’m assuming [...]

I came upon an interesting post by Leonard Lin, a developer and (according to Linked In) former Yahoo!-er.  It’s called Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition, and talks about issues with scaling a rapidly expanding application infrastructure.
Among the things I like about the article (including the word Asshattery, which is one of my favorite words, [...]

I dare say there are very few web servers left on the Internet. I think you’d have to spend a considerable amount of time trying to actually find one.
Now, given that you’re reading this on a web server, and there are obviously millions of websites, you may be asking yourself what the heck is [...]

Eight years ago I wrote an article called “It’s Always The Load Balancer“, and eight years later, that’s still the case. But despite being the undeserved scape-goat of an infrastructure’s (and society’s) ills, there are a few things that actually are the load balancers fault (and those who charged with their administration). And [...]

As I’ve stated before, I think it’s important to keep in mind that the load balancer/application delivery market is actually two separate markets: The enterprise market and the value market.
The first market, the Enterprise market, is the one most are familiar with. Dominated by F5, Cisco, and a handful of others, this market caters [...]

Sounds kind of like a 007 reference, but really it was a Beastie Boys reference. At first I thought it might be too young for my target audience, but then I realized it actually goes in the other direction and substantially dates me. Crud.
Anyhoo, this topic came up recently, and it’s something [...]