Patent ID: 7590989

Claim:
A load balancer system comprising: a processor; a memory; servers configured to host content for a network site; disparate load balancers configured to manage data communications for one or more of the servers such that the data communications are substantially balanced across the servers, each of the disparate load balancers further configured to be controlled via a respective different interface of different interfaces, wherein the each of the disparate load balancers manages traffic to the one or more of the servers; a load balancer management service including an application program interface (API) on the memory that provides universal communication with the different interfaces of the disparate load balancers, the API configured to receive an instruction set to manage the disparate load balancers, the API further configured to communicate the instruction set as translated instruction sets to the disparate load balancers, wherein each respective translated instruction set of the translated instruction sets is communicated to the each of the disparate load balancers via the respective different interface such that the respective different interface processes the each respective translated instruction set that corresponds to the respective different interface to control the each of the disparate load balancers, wherein the instruction set includes instructions for taking a server of the servers offline and instructions for placing a server of the servers online, wherein the load balancer management service includes translation modules configured to translate on the processor the instruction set received by the API into the translated instruction sets that are each recognized by the respective different interface of the each of the disparate load balancers, wherein the servers are Web servers and the network site is a web-site and wherein the load balancer management service is implement as a Web-based service, and wherein the load balancer management service includes a graphical user interface via which a user develops a custom automation script to communicate with the different interfaces via the API to manage the disparate load balancers.