CloudAcademy – Alibaba Server Load Balancer (SLB)

This course provides an introduction to Alibaba’s Server Load Balancer service, also known as SLB. The course begins with a brief intro to load balancing in general and then takes a look at Alibaba SLB and its three main components. We’ll look at how SLB can be used for high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster tolerance. You will also learn about SLB instance clusters, traffic routing, and security, before finally moving on to a demonstration from the Alibaba Cloud platform that shows how to set up a Server Load Balancer with two servers.

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Learning Objectives

• Learn about load balancing and Alibaba’s Server Load Balancer (SLB) service
• Understand the three main components of SLB
• Learn about high availability and fault tolerance with Alibaba SLB
• Learn about the running and operations of SLB
• Set up a Server Load Balancer

Intended Audience

This course is intended for anyone who wants to learn about the basics of Alibaba’s Server Load Balancer service and how to use it.

Prerequisites

To get the most out of this course, you should have a basic understanding of Alibaba Cloud. Some knowledge of load balancing would also be beneficial.

Hello and welcome to this course on Alibaba’s Server Load Balancer, commonly known as SLB. In this introduction, I will cover what’s coming up in the following sessions.

• In session one, there’ll be an introduction to load balancing. I’ll talk about the concept of why we need a load balancing solution and explain what Alibaba’s load balancing service is.
• In session two, SLB components, I’ll explain how the three main components of Server Load Balancer come together to form the SLB service.
• In session three, using SLB for fault tolerance, I will explain how SLB is used to provide high availability or fault tolerance in a single zone, disaster tolerance in multiple zones, and the method for supporting cross-region disaster tolerance.
• In session four, SLB architecture, I’ll explain how SLB instances are deployed in clusters to synchronize sessions and protect backend servers from single points of failure, improving redundancy and insurance service stability. I will also cover how traffic is directed through the SLB and cover the built-in security mechanism that is provided to filter all traffic bound for the backend servers that are attached to the Server Load Balancer.
• And in session five, I’ll finish up with a demonstration in the Alibaba console of setting up a Server Load Balancer with two servers in different zones providing the same web service.

That concludes this introduction to the course. I look forward to talking to you in the first session, an introduction to server load balancing.