Introduction to Load Balancing with Canvas

The following article explains the concept of load balancing and how it can be implemented with Canvas.

Load balancing is very common in the computing world, lots of companies such as Netflix which have lots of users logging in to their application are using it to optimize the use of their servers. To avoid all users logging to the same server, the load balancer can be configured to split users into different servers. A good definition of load balancing can be found in the following link:

• What is load balancing?

Canvas uses an Apachet Tomcat server, there are lots of documentation online which explains how the load balancing can be set up with Apache Tomcat:

• Introduction to tomcat cluster configuration
• Load balancer with Apache Tomcat

One important thing to consider before setting up load balancing with Canvas is that you will have to install Canvas on each server. It means that you will have one CWAS folder per server. The CWAS contains the Canvas application (HTML, JS files..) so you will need to keep this folder in sync to make sure that all your users have access to the same Canvas application.