Load balancer

[nuno-silva]

The load balancer is the only entry point into the system: it receives a sequence of web requests and
selects one of the active web server cluster nodes to handle each of the requests.

In a first phase, this job can be performed by an off-the-shelf load balancer such as the ones available at Amazon AWS. Later in the project, you should design a more advanced load balancer that, using metrics data stored in the Metrics Storage System, will pick the best web server node to handle a request.

We need a load balancer for the Checkpoint, but I'm not sure whether In a first phase means this checkpoint or not.

The algorithms for load balancing, auto-scaling and the MSS need not be fully implemented at this stage (metrics can be stored temporarily in the computing nodes) but should be already thought out.