Load Balancing

Spread incoming requests across a pool of identical backends so no single server is the bottleneck or the single point of failure. Get it wrong and the balancer becomes the SPOF it was meant to remove, routes traffic to dead servers, or amplifies an outage by hammering a backend that is already on its knees.

When to reach for this

Reach for a balancer when more than one backend serves the same role and traffic must be split across them; when a single entry point is a SPOF to eliminate; to add or remove servers without clients noticing (the enabler for the stateless tier and autoscaling); or to put one public address in front of a private fleet, with TLS termination, health-gating, and routing in one place.