Load Balancing

Almost everything we build today uses horizontally scalable farms of instances that implement request/reply semantics. Horizontal scaling helps with overall capacity and resilience, but it introduces the need for load balancing. Load balancing is all about distributing requests across a pool of instances to serve all requests correctly in the shortest feasible time. In the previous section we looked at DNS round-robin as a means of load balancing. In this section we will consider active load balancing. This involves a piece of hardware or software inline between the caller and provider instances, as illustrated in the figure.

images/design_for_production/lb_and_vips.png

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