Load Balancing with Spring Cloud LoadBalancer

In a microservices architecture, you often have multiple instances of the same service running. Client-side load balancing means the client (the service consumer) is responsible for choosing which instance to send a request to.

Unlike server-side load balancing (like Nginx), where a central proxy distributes requests, here the client actively participates in the decision. This can reduce network hops and improve responsiveness.

Spring Cloud LoadBalancer is a client-side load balancer that works seamlessly with Spring Cloud applications. It's the modern successor to Netflix Ribbon in the Spring ecosystem.

It integrates with service discovery mechanisms (like Eureka or Consul) to get a list of available service instances and then applies a load balancing algorithm to select one for each request.