Introduction to Load Balancers
Learn about the basics of load balancers and the services offered by them.
What is load balancing?
Millions of requests could arrive per second in a typical data center. To serve these requests, thousands (or a hundred thousand) servers work together to share the load of incoming requests.
Note: Here, it’s important that we consider how the incoming requests will be divided among all the available servers.
A load balancer (LB) is the answer to the question. The job of the load balancer is to fairly divide all clients’ requests among the pool of available servers. Load balancers perform this job to avoid overloading or crashing servers.
The load balancing layer is the first point of contact within a data center after the firewall. A load balancer may not be required if a service entertains a few hundred or even a few thousand requests per second. However, for increasing client requests, load balancers provide the following capabilities:
- Scalability: By adding servers, the capacity of the application/service can be increased seamlessly. Load balancers make such upscaling or downscaling transparent to the end users.