What is Network Traffic Management?
Network traffic management, also known as application traffic management, refers to a methodology that F5 pioneered for intercepting, inspecting, and translating network traffic, directing it to the optimum resource based on specific business policies. This allows network administrators to apply availability, scalability, security, and performance standards to any IP-based application, significantly increasing overall network application performance.
Network load balancers are a key component of network traffic management strategies, as they play an important role in distributing incoming network traffic across multiple local and wide area networks so that large volumes of user requests are handled in a manner that maximizes performance and reliability.
A large network is typically built by connecting multiple smaller networks together. A network can be as small as two computers in a home or as big as the Internet. When the computers, servers, or devices in a network are in close proximity to each other, such as inside a single office or home, the network is referred to as a local area network (LAN). Connecting multiple LANs, usually across a larger geographical area, yields a wide area network (WAN). The internet itself can be thought of as a WAN that aggregates many smaller WANs.
To manage large traffic volumes at their websites, companies often place a load balancer in front of a group of servers connected to the same LAN and running the same applications (sometimes referred to as a server farm). For even greater redundancy, a company might distribute requests across the servers on multiple LANs aggregated into a WAN. One of the goals of load balancing is to maximize application reliability by eliminating single points of failure. Deploying network load balancers to load balance across servers on multiple LANs or even multiple WANs ensures that even if all servers in a LAN fail (or a network partition isolates the LAN), users don’t experience failure, because traffic is redirected to accessible LANs where servers are still online.
A common type of network load balancer is a global server load balancer (GSLB), which distributes user requests across multiple geographically distributed groups of servers. Users experience fast responses to their requests because servers are nearby (either geographically or in terms of network hops), and companies can be confident in the high availability of their websites in all but the most extreme cases of network and server failure.
F5 products that support network traffic management strategies include the F5 BIG-IP® product family, which filters and routes IP and network traffic to the best application or web service, based on packet headers and payloads. The result is significant cost savings and dramatic gains in operational efficiency.
In addition, F5 NGINX Plus and NGINX are the best-in-class load‑balancing solutions used by high‑traffic websites such as Dropbox, Netflix, and Zynga. As a software load balancer, NGINX Plus is significantly less expensive than hardware solutions with similar capabilities. Its sophisticated load-balancing algorithms, server health checks, and other features make it ideal for use in distributing network traffic across a group of servers.
