Leasing Agents Distributed Load Balancing
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Hardware load balancers suffer from being a single point of failure and are expensive, while decentralized load balancers lack a global view of the enterprise system, leading to suboptimal performance.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a set of leasing agents that allocate service requests among producer systems, providing a distributed load balancing mechanism with a global view of all producer systems, thus avoiding the drawbacks of hardware and decentralized load balancers.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If a hardware load balancer is used to balance load across producer systems, then load balancing effectiveness is improved, but system cost increases and a single point of failure is created
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides the load balancing function into multiple independent leasing agents distributed across the network. Each leasing agent manages a subset of producer systems, eliminating the single point of failure inherent in centralized hardware load balancers while maintaining effective load distribution through coordinated operation of multiple agents
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces leasing agents as intermediary components between consumer systems and producer systems. These agents maintain global state information and make load balancing decisions, providing both the effectiveness of centralized control and the reliability of distributed architecture by acting as intelligent mediators that prevent any single point of failure
2Productivity
If a hardware load balancer is used to balance load, then load distribution is improved, but system cost increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent replaces expensive hardware load balancers with software-based leasing agents that can be deployed across standard computing infrastructure. Multiple virtual instances of the load balancing logic are created and distributed, providing the same load distribution functionality at lower cost by using software copies instead of dedicated hardware
Solution Approach 2:
The patent uses software-based leasing agents that can be rapidly deployed, modified, and replaced on standard hardware platforms. These virtualized load balancing components are far cheaper than physical hardware load balancers and can be instantiated as needed, reducing both acquisition and operational costs while maintaining load distribution effectiveness
3Reliability
If a decentralized load balancer is used to avoid single point of failure, then reliability is improved, but global view of the system is lost leading to suboptimal performance
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines the reliability of decentralized architecture with the global view capability of centralized systems by having multiple leasing agents share and synchronize their state information. The agents collectively maintain a complete picture of the system state through intercommunication, allowing distributed decision-making with centralized awareness, thus achieving both reliability and optimal performance
Data Source
AI summary
Processes and systems are disclosed for selecting a producer system from a number of producer systems to lease to a consumer system. A leasing agent, in response to a request from the consumer system for access to a service at a producer system, can identify a producer system to lease to the lease requestor based, at least in part, on a selection weight associated with each producer system that the leasing agent is assigned. The selection weights can be modified based on status information associated with each of the producer systems. This status information may be obtain from the producer systems and/or from a consumer system that has previously accessed the producer system. The consumer system may provide the status information to the leasing agent as part of the consumer system's lease request.