What is Load Balance
Introduction
Load balancing is a crucial concept in modern IT infrastructure. It ensures that a server or network does not get overwhelmed by an influx of traffic, improving the overall performance and reliability. In this guide, we will cover the basics of load balancing in just 30 minutes. You’ll learn what load balancing is, how it works, and the different types of load balancing.
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What is Load Balancing?
Load balancing is the process of distributing traffic across multiple servers, networks, or resources. It is used to prevent any single server or resource from becoming overwhelmed and failing to respond to requests. Load balancing can be performed at various levels, including network, transport, and application layers.
How Load Balancing Works
Load balancing works by distributing traffic across multiple servers or resources. There are several ways to implement load balancing, but the most common method is to use a load balancer. A load balancer is a device or software that acts as a traffic cop, directing incoming traffic to the most available server or resource.
Benefits of Load Balancing
There are several benefits to introducing load balancers into your system but not limited to the following:
- Reduced downtime
- Scalability
- Redundancy
- Flexibility
- Efficiency
Failover
Certain types of load balancers are aware of server “health” and their current availability status. If servers are performing less than ideally, LBs can take action to improve performance.
In extreme scenarios where badly behaving servers are present in our system, we can safely rotate them out of the pool with reduced impact on our upstream services and clients. Failover must take place quickly to avoid gaps in service, significantly improving reliability and availability.
Load balancers are fundamental components of modern distributed systems. They are a great tool to have in your arsenal when upgrading your architecture on your scaling journey.
Types of Load Balancing
There are several types of load balancing, including round-robin, least connections, IP hash, and content-based load balancing. Round-robin load balancing distributes traffic in a circular pattern, while least connections load balancing directs traffic to the server with the least number of active connections. IP hash load balancing uses the source IP address of the client to determine which server to send traffic to, while content-based load balancing directs traffic based on the type of content being requested.
- HTTP Load Balancing:
https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/load-balancer/tcp-udp-load-balancer/ - TCP and UDP Load Balancing:
https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/load-balancer/tcp-udp-load-balancer/
Reference
https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/load-balancer/http-load-balancer/https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/performance/what-is-load-balancing/https://architecturenotes.co/load-balancers/https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/load-balancer/load-balancer-overviewhttps://www.f5.com/glossary/load-balancer
