By James Rago, Principal Product Manager, Progress Software
No business can afford downtime. This fact applies to the largest conglomerate just as much as the smallest niche e-commerce concern. In the always-on modern economy, no amount of downtime is acceptable.
In large part, this comes down to the consumer for whom seamlessness is a baseline expectation. And if your website can't provide that friction-free experience, one of your competitors gladly will. Per recent data from Omnisend, 17% of consumers will jump ship if faced with even a slight on-site technical issue.
Businesses must be as vigilant about downtime as their customers are, treating it as a serious threat and strategically designing their systems to prevent it from ever occurring. Many factors go into a seamless user experience, but one of these might be more significant than others—the deployment of load-balancers.
The Impacts of Unplanned Downtime
Before delving into why load-balancers are so essential in this context, it is worth expanding on the many ways that unplanned downtime can harm businesses.
We have already addressed the obvious—lost sales. On this point, it is essential to highlight that the entirety of an application need not be offline for downtime to have significant impacts.
A mere six-second glitch can send consumers scurrying to your competitors.
Which leads to an important point: availability needs to be uniform across internal operations. ‘Downtime’ doesn’t mean a total shut-down: Only a single component of your website needs to be non-functional to generate disastrous knock-on effects.
This arguably goes double for B2B companies. If a potential client is checking out your site and finds that it isn’t working, it could mean the difference between a lucrative, ongoing partnership and a permanently lost client.
But downtime, of course, doesn't merely affect your consumers. It also affects your own staff's ability to get their work done. In a B2B context, downtime can also impact business partners if an offline application blocks workflow. Even more alarming is what application downtime can do in factory settings, with forced shutdowns a distinct possibility. (As manufacturers know, restarting a production line is not cheap.)
All of these things can have drastic impacts on your business's reputation. It may not be fair, but unplanned downtime is among the key drivers of customer dissatisfaction and subsequent reputation damage. And that's not even to mention the toll that downtime can take internally, with IT teams scrambling to get things back online in time and with high-priority tasks being set aside to deal with downtime-related issues.
Delivering Higher Availability Through Load-Balancers
The importance of high availability cannot be overstated, and it’s clear that few tools are more effective than load balancers.
First, a quick definition. You can think of a load balancer as a kind of traffic controller. Perched in front of the backend application servers, it accepts incoming access requests from clients and then distributes them across the backend server pool. Using a virtual IP address (VIP), it acts as a kind of "reverse proxy," representing the application servers to the client. Subsequently, traffic is intelligently steered through advanced algorithms and network traffic monitoring tools.
What are called "health checks" are a central part of this process. Load balancers automatically assess the status of a given server, serving as a buffer between client and application. If a given server is too busy or otherwise unavailable, the load balancer will instantly route the request to a server that is better-equipped to handle the request. (As importantly, it will take the unhealthy server offline until it can properly function again.)
Scalability is the key here: if more resources are needed, additional servers can be effortlessly added. This means your business can expand painlessly, day-to-day, particularly when contracting with cloud providers.
The load balancer's advantageous position between the client and the application server also allows it to perform a variety of useful purposes, particularly surrounding security: web application firewalls (WAF) and authentication enhancements like two-factor authentication (2FA) both come to mind here. Given the significant risks posed by cyberattacks, the benefit of these supplementary functions cannot be overstated.
Whether you run a consumer-facing e-commerce site or a B2B cloud service, customers have plenty of alternatives and won’t tolerate a website that doesn’t function properly. Above all, downtime looks unprofessional.
Load balancers, in this respect, serve an indispensable function: like the seatbelt, they are at once simple and life-saving.
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