Infrastructure
Load Balancer
A load balancer acts as a traffic cop, distributing incoming requests across a group of backend servers to prevent overload.
Diagram
┌─────────────┐
│ Client │
└──────┬──────┘
│ Requests
▼
┌─────────────┐
│ Load Balancer│ (Routes traffic)
└──┬─────┬─┬──┘
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
┌──┐ ┌──┐ ┌──┐
│S1│ │S2│ │S3│ (Backend servers)
└──┘ └──┘ └──┘In Depth
A Load Balancer is a server that sits between incoming user traffic and a pool of backend servers, routing each request to one server to balance the workload.
Code Example
Nginx load balancing configuration
upstream backend_servers {
server 10.0.0.1:8080;
server 10.0.0.2:8080;
server 10.0.0.3:8080;
}
server {
listen 80;
location / {
proxy_pass http://backend_servers;
}
}Related Terms