Toward a Cloud-Ready Dynamic Load Balancer Based on the Apache Web Server

Perhaps, the most interesting part of Cloud Computing is rapid elasticity. To be able to exploit the elasticity of a cloud infrastructure, the applications usually need to be able to scale horizontally, i.e. it must be possible to add (and also remove) nodes offering the same capabilities as the existing ones. In such scenarios, a load balancer is usually used. To keep the manual labor down, the load balancer should automatically be able to distribute load to the newly added nodes. In this paper, we show how to transform the popular Apache Web Server (which is only able to act as a static load balancer) into a dynamic cloud-ready load balancer.