CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++load-balancing
Michael
Michael

Reputation: 23

Load balancing mechanism to directly connect backend and clients?

I'm trying to implement a system using multiple servers which communicate with the clients via TCP. As there are going to be multiple backend servers to process clients' requests, I'm wondering if there exists a load balancing mechanism which after the load balancer receives a client request, it connects the client directly to a backend server so that they establish a two-way TCP connection and all future communication between the two is done directly between them and not through the load balancer.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 596

Answers (1)

tadman
tadman

Reputation: 211590

In general terms, no, IP doesn't allow this, individual connections cannot be handed off to other machines. The protocol does not permit it. You can, in the case of high-availability, hand off all connections from one machine to another, but even that is kind of a hack and is done using MAC address shifting.

What you want is probably something like HAProxy which is a TCP/IP load balancer. It's fast enough that being in the middle isn't really a problem, you won't feel a performance hit.

The alternative is to do something in the application layer where your "load balancer" tells clients which server to connect to, but doesn't actually do the connecting. That's done by the client in a secondary request. Sometimes this is done via DNS, sometimes via time-limited tokens to ensure clients respect the routing.

Upvotes: 1

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