An Overview of Load Balancing Techniques in Cloud Computing

—“Cloud computing” is a term that includes virtualization, networking, distributed computing, software and web services. A cloud consists of numerous elements such as data centre, clients and distributed servers. It includes flexibility, fault tolerance, high availability, scalability, reduced overhead for users, reduced cost of ownership, on demand services etc. Fundamental to these issues lies the establishment of an effective load balancing algorithm. The load can be CPU load, delay, memory capacity or network load. Load balancing is the process of allotting the load among various nodes of a distributed system to improve resource utilization as well as job response time while also avoiding a condition where some of the nodes are severely loaded while other nodes are idle or doing very little work. An important issue in cloud is scheduling of user requests i.e. how to allocate resources to these requests so that the requested tasks can be completed in a minimum time and the cost gained in the task should also be minimum. It is a type of load balancing and is not to be tangled with Domain Name System (DNS) load balancing. Whereas DNS load balancing uses hardware or software to achieve the purpose. Cloud load balancing uses facilities offered by various computer network companies. The main focus of paper is to study various load balancing algorithms and their applicability in cloud environment.