What is the Global Load Balancer?
ngrok's Global Load Balancer improves the performance and resiliency of your applications by distributing traffic to the point of presence with the least latency from the client, and away from failing points of presence and upstream services.
Every application you deliver with ngrok is automatically accelerated with our always-on, zero-configuration global load balancer.
Global lobal balancing is sometimes called 'Global Server Load Balancing' or GSLB.
vs. Traditional GSLBs
ngrok operates differently from a traditional GSLB to give you some important benefits.
Automatic geo-aware failover
Traditional GSLBs require you to run geographically redundant copies of your application and configuring networking technologies to distribute and failover traffic among these deployments. By contrast, ngrok runs a global delivery network of PoPs for you. This means that even if you only deploy your upstream service to a single geography, your apps still get faster from Connection Acceleration and Module Acceleration.
Zero configuration
Traditional GSLB deployments require network configuration updates, such as IP provisioning and DNS record changes, to bring new applications and services online.
With ngrok, when you deploy your applications and services to a new geographic location, nearby traffic is automatically routed to those services.
Secure connections
Unlike a traditional reverse proxy, ngrok forwards traffic to your upstream services over secure connections established by the ngrok agent, Agent SDKs or Kubernetes Controller. So which PoPs do those agents connect to? ngrok also applies GSLB principles to those connections, ensuring that your agents connect to the geographically closest PoPs.