Load Balancing: Ribbon

Introduction #

Microservices have the advantage that each microservice can be scaled independently of the other microservices.

To do this, it is necessary that the call to a microservice can be distributed to several instances by a load balancer.

Central load balancer #

Typically, a single load balancer is used for all calls. Therefore, a single load balancer, which processes all requests from all microservices, can also be used for an entire microservices system.

However, such an approach leads to a bottleneck since all network traffic must be routed through this single load balancer.

The load balancer is also a single point of failure. If the load balancer fails, all network traffic stops functioning and the entire microservices system fails.