Network Servers and Services Lesson 009: Load Balancers

What is a load balancer also known as?

A content switch.

Load Balancer/Content Switch

Distributes incoming requests across a number of servers inside a server farm or a cloud infrastructure.

Why is a load balancer important?

Because its functionality ensures that server/s won’t be overwhelmed by incoming requests.

What would happen to applications, websites, and services without the use of a load balancer?

A single server would crash due to a self-imposed DoS attack.

What does a load balancer act as?

A traffic cop, directing traffic to the most available server to fulfill a request.

What benefits come from the use of a load balancer?

Maximized speed and efficient use of all existing server capacity.

What does DoS stand for?

Denial of Service.

What does DDoS stand for?

Distributed Denial of Service.

What is one of the key things that help defend against a DDoS attack?

The use of a load balancer to mitigate server load.

Denial of Service Attack

Involves a continual flooding of victim systems with requests for services with one device and causes system crashes.

Distributed Denial of Service Attack

Multiple machines simultaneously launch attacks on the server to force it offline.

What does IPSs stand for?

Intrusion Prevention Systems.

Besides using a load balancer, how can organization mitigate the risk of a successful DDoS attack from taking down their servers?

Blackholing/Sinkholing, IPSs, utilizing elastic cloud infrastructure.

Blackholing/Sinkholing

Identifies any attacking IP addresses and routes their traffic to a non-existent server through a null interface.

How do attackers attempt to get around the utilization of blackholing/sinkholing?

By using another IP address to start the attack again.

Intrusion Prevention Systems

Used to identify and respond to DoS attacks.

What is the limitation with IPSs?

They don’t have enough processing power to handle large-scale attacks.

Elastic Cloud Infrastructure

Allows scaling up on demand as needed, giving organizations the ability to ride out DoS or DDoS attacks.

What is the caveat to utilizing elastic cloud infrastructure as a means to protect against the affects of a DoS or DDoS attack?

Cloud service providers will charge for the increased utilization of capacity and resources.