Load Balancing Servers, Firewalls, and Caches

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 208 pages
• Published by: Wiley
• Edition: 1st Edition January 25, 2002
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0471415502
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0471415503
• Book Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.4 x 0.7 inches
• Weighs: 7.2 ounces

Reader Reviews
This book is a very well written and nicely organised introduction to server load balancing. The author describes the basics of load balancing, including NAT, session persistence, and network architectures. A discussion on application-layer parsing was quite good. There is also a chapter on global server load balancing (including incorporating load-balancing into the authoritative DNS server) which I found to be very detailed and interesting. Much of the book is centered on how to load balance TCP (and to a lesser extent UDP), and the author uses HTTP and FTP as his primary driving examples. Throughout the book, the author provides some insight regarding what approaches real companies use (e.g. "this method is what Foundry and Cisco uses."), which I liked very much. Also, the illustrations were plentiful (although a bit primitive-looking). There are only a few negatives about this book. The english writing is a bit stilted at times, and the chapters on firewalls and caches were basically rehashes of earlier chapters. Finally, I was hoping the author would have provided more detail on the load-distribution heuristics (which server to choose) with more metrics and actual real-world results. I found the book to be extremely well organised. You will not get lost while reading this book, but you will need a university-level understanding of TCP/IP (and probably the link layer as well to get the NAT material) and networks in general to fully appreciate the matieral. Overall, a great book. Comment | | (Report this)