• Hardware devices (like the one pictured above) that physically live in organizations’ IT departments or data centers.
• Software solutions that can be installed on physical or virtual machines in data centers, on-premises, or in the cloud.

Organizations looking for simple load balancing capabilities should go for standard hardware or software-based load balancers as these are cost-effective and easy to install and manage. Some vendors combine load balancing functionality with additional capabilities, such as security features. For example, Loadbalancer.org appliances come complete with a web application firewall (WAF) as a standard feature.

Load balancers are most commonly deployed in active-passive pairs to ensure zero downtime in business-critical applications. All traffic can then be redirected to the redundant device, both to provide business continuity in the event of a failure and to remove the need for scheduled downtime for maintenance.

• High availability: ensuring applications are always accessible
• Scalability: making it easy to change server infrastructure without disrupting the user experience
• Security: adding additional layers of security to your IT applications
• Zero downtime: instantly and automatically rerouting traffic to an alternate server in the cluster, eliminating interruption in application availability
• Redundancy: if something goes wrong with one server, the backup servers take over and restart applications that were running on the failed server
• IT flexibility: allowing technicians to disconnect, patch, upgrade and reconnect servers without any disruption for users
• Efficiency: providing consistent and fast app performance for thousands of concurrent users.