What type of load balancing options are available with Gigality PaaS?
Load balancing is a process of traffic navigation and workload distribution across multiple components, which is performed by the dedicated type of nodes called load balancers. In Gigality PaaS such instance(s) can be manually added into the environment topology and will be automatically provided upon scaling the application server to distribute requests between backends.

Note: Gigality PaaS provides load balancing on the application
layer (described in this document) and on infrastructure layer providing
Shared Load Balancer that handles requests to environments of all users
(apart from the direct connections via Public IP).
Currently, Gigality provides out-of-box support of the six managed load balancer stacks to choose from:
- NGINX is one of the most popular open source
servers in the world, which provides customers with great performance,
ensuring the efficiency of their applications. Using NGINX requires no
extra steps or pre-configuration. It offers a built-in Layer 7 load
balancing and content caching to provide a cost-effective and highly
available platform for applications hosting due to its scalability,
security and high resource usage efficiency.
- HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a fast and
reliable open source solution, which is able to handle huge traffic and
offers high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and
HTTP-based applications. Similar to NGINX balancer, it uses a
single-process, event-driven model, which consumes a low (and stable)
amount of memory, enabling HAProxy to process a large number of
concurrent requests simultaneously, ensuring smooth load balancing with
smart persistence and DDOS mitigation.
- The varnish is a web application accelerator also
known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy for dynamic websites with high
traffic. Unlike other proxy servers, it was initially designed to be
focused exclusively on HTTP. Nevertheless, within the Gigality
implementation, it is delivered in a bundle with the NGINX server (run
as an HTTPS proxy), which gives the ability to work with the secure data
and the Custom SSL option in particular. The emphasis is made on the
speed, which is mainly achieved through the caching, making the website
faster by offloading the delivery of the static objects.
- Apache load balancer is an open source traffic distribution server,
which provides high customization options through its modular structure.
Apache balancer can be configured to meet the unique requirements of
each given environment, while, simultaneously, ensuring such benefits as
security, high availability, speed, reliability, and centralized
authentication/authorization.
- LiteSpeed Web ADC (Application Delivery
Controller) is a commercial high-performance HTTP load balancing
solution. It implements all of the cutting edge technologies (e.g.
HTTP/3 or QUIC transport protocol support), provides advanced security
(web application firewall protection, layer-7 anti-DDOS filtering,
etc.), enterprise-level performance (caching, acceleration,
optimization, offloading, etc.) and more.
- Apache Balancer is open source and provides a
server application traffic distribution solution. According to recent
statistics, it has been utilized in over 100,000 websites. One of its
main attractions for providing high availability to web applications is
its customizability which allows it to be programmed to operate in a
number of different modes depending upon the unique requirements of a
given environment. These modes are configured using the MultiProcessing
Modules (MPMs).
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