Introduction to Load Balancers
Define load balancers and their essential role in distributing high traffic across servers to prevent overload. Explore why LBs are crucial for achieving scalability, availability, and performance in modern distributed systems. Identify common placement strategies and key services, such as health checking and security.
What is load balancing?
Typical data centers receive millions of requests per second. To handle this volume, thousands of servers work together to share the load. A load balancer (LB) distributes incoming client requests across a pool of available servers. Its primary job is to divide traffic fairly to prevent any single server from crashing due to overload.
Note: Here, it’s important to consider how incoming requests will be distributed across all available servers.
Why do we need load balancers?
The load balancer is the first point of contact inside a data center after the firewall. While low-traffic services may not require one, load balancers provide critical capabilities as traffic increases:
Scalability: You can add servers to increase capacity seamlessly. Load balancers make upscaling or downscaling transparent to ...