Introduction
A load balancer acts as an entry point for incoming requests, distributing traffic across multiple instances of an application, to ensure scalability, availability, and reliability.
There are a few types of load balancers:
- Static: Uses fixed rules and does not consider the current state of servers
- Dynamic: Uses real-time information about servers, such as CPU and memory usage
- Stateful: Maintains the state of connections between clients and servers
- Stateless: Does not maintain any connection state
Load balancers uses several well-known strategies to effectively distribute traffic. The most relevant ones are:
Round Robin
Round robin distributes incoming requests equally among the servers, without considering their current load.
Weighted Round Robin
Similar to round robin, requests are distributed in order, but server weights are now considered.
Ip Hash
Requests are distributed based on the client's IP address.
URL Hash
The requests are distributed according to its URL.
Least Connections
As its name suggests, it distributes traffic based on the lowest number of active connections among the servers.
Least Response Time
It is very similar to Least Connection strategy. It measures the response time of each server and uses this information to route requests.
Conclusion
Load balancing has proven to be a powerful approach to handling increasing traffic in modern applications. With all the different strategies available, it allows systems to scale while maintaining performance and reliability.
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