Why client-side load balancers like Ribbon?

amazon-web-services load-balancing netflix
user1340582 picture user1340582 · Apr 19, 2015 · Viewed 9.2k times · Source

Netflix makes use of Ribbon, which is in their terms a "client-side load-balancer". What are the use-cases and advantages of a client-side load-balancer compared to a traditional load-balancer? Is Ribbon, and other Netflix OSS services AWS -specific or can they be used in other contexts?

Answer

Oreste picture Oreste · Jun 23, 2015

As already mentioned by using Ribbon you don't need an additional load balancer. You can also configure the balancing algorithm for each client differently, if you need to. At first I was a bit surprised also, but it does make a lot of sense.

Currently Spring Cloud, which uses Netflix OSS for most part, is independent of AWS.

I have made a small POC that you can check out here if want.

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