Abstract: Cloud computing is coming up into view as a new computing standard that is receiving great attention in both academic as well as business community. It provides pay-as-you-use model for accessing different services over the web that can be accessed from anywhere and at any time. Despite of so much of merits it also faces some challenges. One of the main key issues that needed to be taken care of is load balancing. Load balancing is basically about distributing the workload among all the nodes in an even manner such that it will have positive effect on the factors like resource utilization, scalability, fault tolerant etc. Many algorithms and methods have been proposed for this purpose. Here, in this paper we are going to investigate some of these load balancing techniques and the latest approaches used for load balancing in order to provide efficient resource utilization, overall cost minimization etc.

Keywords: cloud computing, load balancing, virtualization, energy aware, load balancing algorithms.