Load Balancing Strategies
Learn how load balancers distribute traffic across multiple servers to enable horizontal scaling, and explore common routing algorithms and health checks.
Why Load Balancing?
Once you scale horizontally, you have many identical servers. But how do clients know which one to hit? A load balancer sits in front of your servers and spreads incoming requests across them.
- Prevents any single server from being overwhelmed
- Enables seamless scaling up and down
- Improves availability if one server fails
Where the Balancer Sits
A load balancer is a reverse proxy: clients connect to one address, and the balancer forwards the request to a healthy backend. The client never sees the internal topology.
This indirection is what makes adding or removing servers invisible to users.
Client --> [Load Balancer] --> Server A
--> Server B
--> Server CAll lessons in this course
- Vertical vs. Horizontal Scaling
- Stateless vs. Stateful Services
- Introduction to Distributed Systems
- Load Balancing Strategies