Web Component
load balancer
When a website’s traffic starts to get quite heavy or it’s running an application that requires high availability, a single web server may no longer be able to do the job. Load balancers provide two primary functions, ensuring that high-traffic sites can handle the load and providing failover if a server becomes unresponsive.
When you request a website that has a load balancer, the load balancer will first receive your request and then forward it to one of the many servers behind it. The load balancer uses different algorithms to help it decide which server is best suited to handle the request. A few examples of these algorithms are round-robin algorithms, which send them to each server in turn, or weighted algorithms, which check how many requests a server is currently handling and send them to the least busy server.
The load balancer also performs regular checks on each server to make sure they are functioning properly; this is called a health check. If the server doesn’t respond correctly or doesn’t respond, the load balancer will stop sending traffic until it responds correctly again.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN can be a great resource for reducing traffic to a busy website. It allows you to host static files on your website such as JavaScript, CSS, images, videos and host them on thousands of servers around the world. When a user requests one of the hosted files, the CDN calculates the physical location of the nearest server and sends the request there instead of to the other side of the world.
WAF (Web Application Firewall)
A WAF sits between your web requests and the web server; its main purpose is to protect the web server from hackers or denial-of-service attacks. It analyzes web requests for common attack techniques and determines whether the request comes from a real browser and not a robot. It also checks if excessive web requests are being sent using rate limiting, which only allows a certain number of requests from a certain IP per second. If a request is considered a potential attack, it will be dropped and never sent to the web server.
2024-12-23 08:37:13