Comparing Load Balancer Configurations: Active-passive vs. Active-active

Active-passive vs. Active-active Load Balancing: A Comprehensive Comparison

Load balancing is a fundamental concept in modern network architecture. It ensures that network traffic or workload gets distributed across multiple servers or resources, thereby ensuring optimal utilization, redundancy, and fault tolerance. One of the major considerations when implementing a load balancing solution is the configuration: active-passive or active-active. Let’s dive deep into the characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages of both configurations.

Active-passive Load Balancing

• In an active-passive setup, one server/resource is active and handles all incoming traffic, while the passive server remains on standby.
• If the active server fails, the passive server takes over, making sure there’s no service interruption.

Advantages

Simplicity: This setup is relatively easier to configure and manage. Monitoring is straightforward since only one server is active at a time.

Clear Failover: In case of a system failure, it’s clear which server takes over, ensuring a predictable failover mechanism.