A Review of Load Balancing Techniques in Cloud Computing

In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in the use of cloud computing. In cloud computing, computer resources, such as the ones which may offer computational power or storage are provided to users who are not directly responsible for the management of the systems that offer these resources. However, as the degree of application of this computing model increases, the number of consumers also increases, and as a result, the overall load that the cloud systems have to manage is also rapidly increasing. Without proper measures, this can result in some systems becoming overloaded while some others may become underloaded. This imbalance in the utilisation of these systems may result in a number of issues such as high-power consumption, high response time etc. To prevent these problems and several others in the cloud computing environment, load balancing techniques are used which enable the systems to share loads with each other in such a way that no system becomes over or under loaded and the degree of utilisation of computing resources is increased resulting in processing efficiency. The authors have conducted a survey of several classes of load balancing algorithms.