What Is IP Address Affinity Technique For Load Balancing?

Technology CommunityCategory: Software ArchitectureWhat Is IP Address Affinity Technique For Load Balancing?
VietMX Staff asked 3 years ago

IP address affinity is another popular way to do load balancing. In this approach, the client IP address is associated with a server node. All requests from a client IP address are served by one server node.

This approach can be really easy to implement since IP address is always available in a HTTP request header and no additional settings need to be performed. This type of load balancing can be useful if you clients are likely to have disabled cookies.

However there is a down side of this approach. If many of your users are behind a NATed IP address then all of them will end up using the same server node. This may cause uneven load on your server nodes. NATed IP address is really common, in fact anytime you are browsing from a office network its likely that you and all your coworkers are using same NATed IP address.