The Design of an Adaptive Middleware Load Balancing and Monitoring Service

Middleware is increasingly used as the infrastructure for applications with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements, including scalability. One way to improve the scalability of distributed applications is to use adaptive middleware to balance system processing load dynamically among multiple servers. Adaptive middleware load balancing can help improve overall system performance by ensuring that client application requests are distributed and processed equitably across groups of servers. This paper presents the following contributions to research on adaptive middleware load balancing techniques: (1) it describes deficiencies with common loadbalancing techniques, such as introducing unnecessary overhead or not adapting dynamically to changing load conditions, and (2) it describes the capabilities and design of Cygnus, which is an adaptive load balancing service. The findings in this paper show that adaptive middleware load balancing is a viable solution for improving the scalability of distributed applications.