My good friend Karel Kubat is the author of Crossroads, a very fast, stable and reliable software loadbalancer. It does everything you might expect from a software load balancer / failover utility for TCP based services. Crossroads is a fully open source GPL project. More and more large organisations are using Crossroads for all their balancing needs. Crossroads is really well optimized and uses as little resources as possible. Even the option parser is a separate binary that just loads a binary version of the configuration into the daemon. Crossroads comes with a separate web frontend for management.

Although Crossroads primarily balances network load you can also use it for other purposes. For instance if you have to connect your computer to many different network setups Crossroads can help you out. If you visit many clients or offices with different network setups Crossroads can hide the differences. For example the HTTP proxy. You just define a local HTTP proxy in Crossroads. This is the proxy you configure in your browser. In Crossroads you can define multiple backends for that local HTTP proxy. For each office or location you define backend(s). Now just plugin your computer in the network and Crossroads will connect to the first HTTP proxy it finds. You don’t have to reconfigure your browser anymore no matter in what office you are. It just always works. You can do this for other TCP network services as well.

Now how about performance you ask? Interested in usage statistics? Read this entry on Karel’s blog. Very impressive and encouraging figures. And even more HTTP optimizations are underway in the 1.7x version. Now go over the the homepage of Crossroads and download your copy now. Now if you ever need balancing or failover on the network: think Crossroads.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 0:01 and is filed under software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.