We’re pleased to release a new feature on the Section platform: Load Balancing for your origin servers. Even with a content delivery solution such as Section and caching in place, websites still need to make sure their origin servers are available for crucial tasks such as generating user-specific content and going through a checkout process.
Websites with global audiences want their users to be served content from the closest origin server, but to be routed to another server if that one is having issues. They may also want to serve unique content to visitors from different geographical locations (such as pages in another language or region-specific sale information).
Load balancing allows websites to automatically route traffic to a different origin server if one server is down, and to serve unique content to visitors from different geo locations, browsers, or device types. In addition, Section can send requests to different servers based on various algorithms to ensure one server is not getting all of the traffic from a traffic spike such as a sale or electronic direct mail campaign.
We do this by providing all of our users with Varnish Cache Configuration Language for load balancing and the ability to set unlimited load balancing rules within the Section platform. Since Section gives users code-level control over unmodified Varnish Cache, Section users are able to configure many different load balancing scenarios. To get started, we have provided the VCL and tutorials for common load balancing configurations.
In the future, we will add more configuration options to this feature. We encourage users to look at these sources for additional use cases. Find out more about Section load balancing here and contact us if you’re interested in learning more.
