摘要 |
The present invention comprises an apparatus and method for distributed traffic control in a horizontally scaled application, in which a software-based application is implemented as a number of peer application instances that each provide a portion of the application's overall capability or capacity. An apparatus that includes a distributed traffic controller is instantiated or otherwise implemented at each application instance, and these apparatuses collectively operate to limit the overall utilization of the application by individual clients or affiliated groups of clients according to, e.g., Service Level Agreements or SLAs, and further operate to prevent disproportionate utilization of any one of the application instances. Advantageously, such operations are accomplished according to the teachings herein using efficient information propagation protocols between the distributed traffic controllers. |