Load Balancing in Distributed Systems
Explore the concept of load balancing within distributed systems to understand how traffic is distributed evenly across server nodes. Learn about the role of load balancers in monitoring node health and ensuring high availability, as well as methods to prevent them from becoming a single point of failure. This lesson provides foundational knowledge to build resilient and scalable distributed architectures.
In distributed systems, balancing load evenly across multiple nodes is one of the fundamental problems that every system owner needs to solve.
We ended the last lesson with a sneak peek of the term load balancers. Let’s discuss more in this lesson.
What is a load balancer?
A load balancer (LB) is basically a node in a distributed system that tries to evenly distribute traffic among the actual server nodes.
The diagram shows a common scenario of load balancing in distributed systems:
- Requests from your clients come to your system via the public internet and hit the LB. Basically, the LB is sitting in between the clients and the servers.