The Barracuda Web Application Firewall provides load balancing, caching, and compression of website traffic to improve website performance. It can load balance all TCP traffic in proxy deployments, and by using content rules it can implement load balancing, caching, and compression of HTTP application layer data for any deployment.
When the Barracuda Web Application Firewall is in proxy mode, all incoming TCP traffic can be distributed to balance the processing load across multiple backend servers. Persistence is maintained for requests from the same client, and server health is monitored, so requests are served as efficiently as possible.
In addition, for HTTP data, content rules can be used to route requests to servers that are optimized to handle specific content types. This Layer-7 load balancing is available only for HTTP data, and can be used with any deployment configuration of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall. Content rules also provide caching or compression options for matching HTTP data, which can decrease data processing demands on the website.