Proxy load balancing
The main advantage of proxy load balancing is the simplicity of the client. It will only need a single endpoint to create a connection with. All of the workload problems, the security issues and the awareness of the health of every backend server, will be completely transparent to the client.
Another advantage is that the TLS certificates must be managed directly by the proxy. Backend servers don’t need to have secured connections, which makes the architecture much less complex.
In return, the latency will be increased and the throughput may be limited by the capabilities of the proxy.
There are two kind of proxies in function of the OSI level that they work on:
- Transport Level: this option is dumber, but easier to implement. This is done on the TCP level, where the proxy just checks that the socket is open, in order to know if the backend is up and running. This kind of proxy is very performant since there is no payload treatment. Client data is just copied...
