Routing network traffic requests to provide load balancing using hashes derived from attributes of the requests

摘要

A traffic manager (121-124) for, and a method of, routing network traffic to a plurality of server computers (131-138). The traffic manager includes a network interface and a processor. The processor is configured to receive network a request (801) from a client computer (102-105) via the network interface. The processor identifies, based on attributes of the request, which may be used to create a hash, a server computer that is responsible for servicing the request, preferably by determining a server computer responsible for servicing requests having that hash. The processor is configured to route the request to the responsible server. The traffic manager may be one in a cluster of traffic managers the hash being used to determine which traffic manager is responsible for routing the request. If a server computer or traffic manager go offline its responsibilities may be reallocated to other server computers and traffic managers respectively.