Topics

Load balancers distribute incoming network traffic across multiple servers to optimize resource usage and prevent overload. They act as traffic managers for distributed systems.

Common load balancing algorithms:

Load balancing can occur at multiple system layers:

  • Between users and web servers
  • Between web servers and application servers
  • Between application servers and databases

Note

Modern cloud platforms provide managed load balancing services (AWS ELB, Azure LB, GCP Load Balancer, HAProxy etc) that handle scaling automatically.