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Friday, March 22, 2024

Load Balancer Basics

 


Load balancers are essential components in modern application architectures, designed to distribute incoming traffic efficiently across multiple servers. Load balancers improve application performance, availability, and scalability.

Traffic Distribution:
Load balancers evenly distribute incoming traffic among a pool of servers, ensuring optimal resource utilization and preventing any single server from becoming overwhelmed. Algorithms like round-robin or least connections are used to select the most suitable server for each request.

High Availability:
If a server fails, the load balancer automatically redirects traffic to the remaining healthy servers. This ensures that the application remains accessible even in the event of server failures, minimizing downtime and improving overall availability.

SSL Termination:
Load balancers can handle SSL/TLS encryption and decryption, offloading this CPU-intensive task from backend servers. This improves server performance and simplifies SSL certificate management.

Session Persistence:
For applications that require maintaining user sessions on a specific server, load balancers support session persistence. They ensure that subsequent requests from a user are consistently routed to the same server, preserving session integrity.

Scalability:
Load balancers facilitate horizontal scaling by allowing easy addition of servers to the pool. As traffic increases, new servers can be provisioned, and the load balancer will automatically distribute the load across all servers, enabling seamless scalability.

Health Monitoring:
Load balancers continuously monitor server health and performance. They exclude unhealthy servers from the pool, ensuring that only healthy servers handle incoming requests. This proactive monitoring maintains optimal application performance.

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