10x performance boost for Load Balancers! (with new pricing)

We first launched our Load Balancing service back in January 2011 and have been making continual improvements over the last 8 years.

Today, though, we’re announcing some of our biggest improvements yet!

Firstly, we’ve boosted the capacity to support up to 400,000 concurrent connections — which is a 10x capacity increase on the previous generation.

Secondly, we’ve vastly improved the build time for new load balancers to around 8 seconds — which is more than a 10x faster build time than the previous generation.

To make this possible we’ve made some major backend improvements which also provides improved reliability as well as a better foundation for new functionality in the future (see below).

Price change

This all comes with a price change of course. Load Balancers are now 10x more expensive Due to some of the infrastructure improvements we’ve made, we are reducing the price to £20 per month, which means that Load Balancers now cost 30% less than they did previously.

Of course all the other great things about our Load Balancers stay the same:

• Highly available
• Automated health checks
• HTTPS acceleration
• Automated Let’s Encrypt HTTPS certificate generation and renewal
• Multi-protocol, HTTP, HTTPS, Websockets, TCP
• Dual stack IPv6 and IPv4
• Cloud IP enabled - instantly move IP addresses between Cloud Servers, Load Balancers and Cloud SQL instances to avoid DNS changes.
• Can be fully controlled via GUI, CLI and REST API.

Roadmap for Load Balancers

Due to some of the backend improvements we’ve made, there are a number of new features on the roadmap for Load Balancers:

• Enable balancing to non-Brightbox backend servers, to ease multi-cloud deployments and migrations
• HTTP/2 support (done)
• Ability to mount Orbit containers as sub-paths, to allow serving of static assets directly from your own domains and via HTTPS
• HTTPS redirects, with HSTS support (done)
• Proxy Protocol support to preserve client IP address information, even via raw TCP services (done)
• Path-based layer 7 routing
• Edge caching

Proxy protocol, HTTPS redirects and path-based routing in particular will be welcome additions for users of our Kubernetes ingress controller, allowing for smoother HTTP deployments.

If there are other features you’d like to see as part of our Load Balancing service or if you have feedback or suggestions about our existing roadmap, please do get in touch - we’d love to hear from you.

Try Load Balancers on Brightbox

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