System Design on AWS

Chapter 5. Load Balancing Approaches and Techniques

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In the quest for scalability and to ensure uninterrupted availability of services, organizations have adopted horizontal scaling or vertical scaling techniques as discussed in Chapter 1. These methods have addressed some of the scalability challenges, but they do not guarantee continuous service availability. The rapid growth of the internet and the need for modern high-traffic websites to handle hundreds of thousands of concurrent requests necessitates a more robust approach.

When a single server is responsible for handling all incoming requests, it becomes overloaded and can lead to system failures. To overcome this limitation, we horizontally scale the system and then, load balancing comes into play to efficiently distribute incoming network traffic across the group of backend servers, often referred to as a server farm or server pool.

In this chapter, we will first start with ...