About Application Load Balancer

Application Load Balancer offers intelligent, scalable traffic management across physical, virtual, and cloud-hosted data centers without requiring the origin to send load feedback. This Cloudlet automatically detects load conditions and routes traffic to the optimal data source. Application Load Balancer also lets you set up custom routing policies and maintain session stickiness for incoming requests.

Application Load Balancer Workflow

Here's how Application Load Balancer works:

1. An ​Akamai​ edge server first receives a request for your site.

2. If the request meets your policy's match criteria, the edge server:

   1. Routes the request to the appropriate data center.

   2. Maintains session stickiness.

3. You set up liveness tests, other edge servers monitor the data centers. When a liveness test detects that a data center is down, it routes traffic to an available data center.

The following diagram shows how Application Load Balancer works:

To learn more about Cloudlets basics, see:
How Cloudlets work
Cloudlets terminology
Property and Cloudlet policy considerations