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Distributed Systems: Building Software for the Real World

Software and Hardware Load Balancing

Learn about software load balancer, reverse proxy server, akamai, and hardware load balancer.

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Software load balancer

Software load balancing is the low-cost approach. It uses an application to listen for requests and dole them out across the pool of instances. This application is basically a reverse proxy server, as shown in the figure below.

Reverse proxy server

A normal proxy multiplexes many outgoing calls into a single source IP address. A reverse proxy server does the opposite: it demultiplexes calls coming into a single IP address and fans them out to multiple addresses. Squid 1^{1} ...