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Dev MaxxingAdvancedDistributed Systems75 sec
Load balancer
A load balancer distributes incoming requests across multiple servers, so no single server has to handle all the traffic alone.
Prerequisite: Distributed system
What matters
Spreading requests across servers lets an application handle more total traffic and keep working even if one server instance fails or becomes overloaded.
Example
A load balancer might route each incoming request to whichever of five identical servers currently has the fewest active connections.
Common misconception
A load balancer does not make an application's servers unnecessary to scale; it distributes existing capacity, but adding more capacity still requires more servers behind it.
Recall question
What problem does spreading requests across multiple servers solve?
Keywords and related concepts
load balancertraffic distributionscalabilitydistributed system