Load Balancing in Cloud Computing: A State of the Art Survey

Cloud computing has proposed a new perspective for provisioning the large-scale computing resources by using virtualization technology and a payper-use cost model. Load balancing is taken into account as a vital part for parallel and distributed systems. It helps cloud computing systems by improving the general performance, better computing resources utilization, energy consumption management, enhancing the cloud services' QoS, avoiding SLA violation and maintaining system stability through distribution, controlling and managing the system workloads. In this paper we study the necessary requirements and considerations for designing and implementing a suitable load balancer for cloud environments. In addition we represent a complete survey of current proposed cloud load balancing solutions which according to our classification, they can be classified into three categories: General Algorithm-based, Architectural-based and Artificial Intelligence-based load balancing mechanisms. Finally, we propose our evaluation of these solutions based on suitable metrics and discuss their pros and cons.