Question

Discuss the reasons why you would use Application Load Balancing and how this would be set up to load balance a Python Django application. Specifically, describe the configuration of the Listener and Target Group running the Python Django application.

Answer 1

Some main reasons why we use Application Load Balancing ...

1.Involves setting up multiple DNS records for the same hosting domain.

2.Very simple to set up, mostly does not require any special server setup at all.

3.Machines serving the site can be as geographically dispersed as you wish.

4.You can also round-robin more than just web requests, so even things like FTP, IRC, and many other services can be load-balanced this way.

5.This allows a web site to be served by multiple independent web servers.

6.Most load balancer solutions include tools for monitoring server load and appropriately sending requests to the least-busy servers, and performing proper failover.

7.With appropriate hardware this can scale to very large proportions, and achieve very good uptime / consistent performance.

((( INTERNET )))
   ----+-----
       |
       |
       |
  +-----------+
  |  Gateway  |-----+
  +-----------+     |
                    |
               +-----------------+  +-------------------+    +----------------+    
               |  Load Balancer  |  |  Database Server  |    |  Web Server 1  |
               +-----------------+  +-------------------+    +----------------+
                      |                      |                       |
Internal network -->  +----------------------+-----------------------+---------
                      |                      |
               +----------------+     +----------------+
               |  Web Server 2  |     |  Web Server 3  |     (more web servers)
               +----------------+     +----------------+