What Can You Load Balance?

The answer is simple. Anything with an IP address that is accessible on the Internet. This means you're not only limited to load balancing your Rackspace Cloud Servers, you can also load balance any external server or IP address. For example, you can load balance an external mail server, a database server, a website, or your personal web server at home. In load balancing terminology, the resources that you can load balance are called nodes.

The following illustrations shows a load balancer with both Rackspace Cloud Servers and an external node:

Adding Nodes

When you create a load balancer using the Control Panel you'll see that Add Nodes is part of the configuration process:

This is where you specify the things you want to load balance. You can add an existing Rackspace Cloud Server or an External IP.

Note that the distance between the node being load balanced and the region of the load balancer can impact performance of the load balancer. We recommend creating the load balancer in the region that is closest to your external nodes.

For more information, see Load Balancing Public Vs. Private IPs.