What is Load Balancing? | Ravi Singh

What is Load Balancing?

To prevent any one device from becoming overloaded, load balancing is the process of dividing network traffic among several servers or resources. Optimizing resource utilization, increasing throughput, reducing response times, and avoiding overwhelming any single resource are the objectives of load balancing.

The application layer, transport layer, and network layer are only a few of the layers of the network stack where load balancing can be implemented.

There are various kinds of load balancing, such as:

1. Round-robin: Using the round-robin load balancing technique, requests are sent successively to each server in a list.

2. Least connections: The server with the fewest active connections is chosen as the destination by this algorithm.

3. IP Hash: This algorithm ensures that requests from the same client are always forwarded to the same server by routing traffic to servers based on the hash of the client's IP address.

4. Least response time: The server that is currently responding the quickest receives traffic using the least response time method.

5. Geographic: To reduce latency, this algorithm routes traffic based on the location of the client, sending clients to the closest server.

Load balancers can also include features like health checking, SSL offloading and caching. Load balancing can be accomplished through the use of hardware load balancers (appliances) or software-based load balancers (proxy servers) that run on general-purpose hardware.

Basically, load balancing is the process of distributing network traffic across multiple servers or resources in order to avoid overloading any single device, optimize resource usage, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overloading any single resource.