I'm researching a future topic on routers. I'm curious if anyone is using a load balancing router. sometimes these are configured for failover, round robin or they have routes based on the packet type. I've looked at things like astaro.com and pfsense. both of which are PC based. which isn't terrible it's just a bigger box. and there are a few hardware offerings from vendors like Cisco (Linsys), HP and Netgear. it seems to me that binding a few lines together will be the default way to get a bigger pipe from here on.

what do you have in use and what are your thoughts about it?

I don't use a load balancing router, but maybe that pack that Leo and Alex have so they can broadcast live does. It binds 6 Cell Phone cards together.

I've moved my companies servers to Amazon's EC2 and we use their Elastic Load Balancer for basic load balancing of our front-end servers. The front-end servers run Varnish for a caching proxy which has its own load balancing of our back-end servers.

The only issue with the Elastic Load Balancer is that is requires the use of CNAME DNS records which is problematic for some of our uses, so we are still using DNS round-robin load balancing for some things.

johnfoster:one thing amazing about EC2 is you don't have to think about CPU intensity the same way you do with real hardware. depending on the task of course. how many "servers" did you move or consolidate down?

We moved so we could grow without the hassle of dealing with ordering servers or leasing them from our hosts at astronomical rates. Right now we have 11 or 12 servers running on EC2.