Load balancing refers to dynamically distributing incoming requests across a group of backend servers, also referred to as a server farm or server pool.
High-traffic websites will serve hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of concurrent requests from users or clients and return the correct text, video, images, or application data, all in a timely and reliable manner. To cost-effectively scale to meet these high volumes, modern computing best practice generally requires the addition of more servers.
The best way to think of a load balancer is to imagine the load balancers is a " traffic cop" that sits in front of your servers and routing the client requests across all servers that are capable of meeting and fulfilling those requests in a manner that increases speed and capacity and ensures that no one server is overworked, as this would lead to degraded performance. If a single server goes down, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining online servers. When a new server is added to the server group, the load balancer will automatically start sending incoming requests to it.
In this manner, a load balancer goes through the following operations:
These are just some of the main benefits that you'll see when load balancing:
Different load balancing algorithms provide different benefits; the choice of load balancing method depends on your requirements:
We hope that this short introduction to load balancing has helped you understand the basic principles and concepts of what load balancing is, and how it works.
