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Distributed Systems: Building Software for the Real World

Software and Hardware Load Balancing

Explore the concepts of software and hardware load balancing to distribute requests across system instances efficiently. Understand reverse proxy servers, their caching benefits, and hardware devices that manage traffic at the network level for improved capacity and fault tolerance.

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Software load balancer

Software load balancing is the low-cost approach. It uses an application to listen for requests and dole them out across the pool of instances. This application is basically a reverse proxy server, as shown in the figure below.

Reverse proxy server

A normal proxy multiplexes many outgoing calls into a single source IP address. A reverse proxy server does the opposite: it demultiplexes calls coming into a single IP address and fans them out to multiple addresses. Squid 1^{1} ...