Load Balancer

Load Balancer is a service that distributes network or application traffic across a group of servers. Load balancers help spread work evenly across multiple computing resources, improving responsiveness and availability of applications.

Load balancers sit between client devices and backend servers. They receive and route incoming requests to any available server capable of fulfilling the request. This prevents any one server from becoming overloaded and improves the overall performance and reliability of applications. Load balancers can balance traffic based on different algorithms, like round-robin, least connections, IP hashing, etc. For example, a round-robin algorithm sends each new request to the next server in line. Load balancers also regularly health check connected servers to ensure traffic is not routed to any failed or overloaded systems. Load balancing is a core component of cloud computing and microservice architectures, allowing services to scale horizontally across pools of resources to meet demand.