Half a million dollars of load balancers? Either you are buying from the wrong vendor, or you have some wonky ideas of how many load balancers you need per data

Half a million dollars of load balancers? Either you are buying from the wrong vendor, or you have some wonky ideas of how many load balancers you need per data center, or are not using them correctly. ( hint: check a10 networks and Zeus) The reality is, that if your problem is only L3, then arguably this can be solved many ways. For example, networks have been doing 10s of gigabits of L3 load balancing using DSR for ages. Dynamic route propagation doesn’t have a hold on this ( albeit it’s more “elegant” ). But most people do more than L3, and really do L4-L7 load balancing, and most modern “application load balancing” platforms are really software packages bundled up in a nice little appliance. This is where packages like varnish with its vcl/vmod’s and caching, Aflex ( from a10 networks ) and Traffic Sscript from Zeus , amongst others, come in. Shuffling bits is the easy part! Understanding the request, and making decisions on that is the harder part. If you split the problem, and are using varnish or nginx as your application load balancer, you can’t claim you’ve gotten rid of them, you were either not buying the right initial platform, or using it correctly. When you put a “stop buying load balancers”… you must first define what you mean by “load balancer” ;) For the record, I've used both commercial load balancing platforms as well as contributed patches and used OSS load balancing platforms..