The load balancers also optimize the performance of new, temporary websites that the city launched during the pandemic so residents could apply for housing assistance and small business grants and get news on food distribution and COVID-19 vaccines, Pledger says.
“We don’t want people to get a ‘page loading’ message or timeout error, so the load balancers give a timelier response,” she says.
The ADC appliances not only improve performance and ensure redundancy, they also bolster security. The load balancers serve as a gateway between the outside world and the inside world and block malicious traffic, such as malware and distributed denial of service attacks, says Information Technology Services Deputy Director Ryon Saenz.
The city relies on the virtual software version of Citrix ADC for any high-demand websites or web-based services. The benefit of virtual load balancers is that the ITS staff can spin them up quickly to ensure fast website speeds.
“It gives us the flexibility and agility to scale out quickly,” Saenz says.
MORE FROM STATETECH: How can DevOps help your agency rapidly scale up services?
Best Practices for Load Balancers
In Texas, El Paso County also uses load balancer appliances to increase capacity, allowing for more concurrent users and improving the reliability of applications, such as its law enforcement records management system, says Christopher Stathis, the county’s CIO.
Stathis and his team say appliance load balancers are complex and not always easy to implement. They recommend that government IT staffers reach out to their application vendors for assistance if needed.
“It is very important to ensure that the applications are set up with the help of enterprise application vendors,” Stathis says. “We have found that many application vendors do not have much experience with having their products being balanced. As a result, we must work hard to get their products functional on these appliances.”
In Alexandria, Citrix ADC constantly monitors system resources and sends alerts to the ITS staff if server utilization reaches a certain threshold that could impact performance. The staff may add more servers into the load balancing pool to ensure good performance, says Alexandria CISO Anthony Harvey.
Overall, load balancers might not get a lot of glory, but they are an important piece of the data center infrastructure, he says.
“Load balancers are critical,” Harvey says. “If you get spikes in traffic, you can shift the traffic on the fly. It makes it a more agile environment for us.”
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