A load balancer is an admission that no single server can do it alone. Here's how distributing traffic across many servers creates something more reliable than any individual machine.
Every load balancing algorithm answers the same question differently: what does 'fair' mean when requests aren't equal? Understanding that question helps you choose the right answer.
Layer 4 load balancers see envelopes—IP addresses and ports. Layer 7 reads letters—URLs, headers, cookies. The layer you choose determines what your load balancer can understand and how fast it can think.
Without health checks, load balancers send traffic into the void. Here's how they detect dead servers and route around failures automatically.
Sticky sessions bind users to specific servers—solving the problem of server-side state while creating new problems of uneven load and fragile failover.
Hardware load balancers are monuments built for traffic you might never see. Software load balancers are tools that grow with you. The choice reveals what you actually value.
GSLB routes users to nearby data centers by giving different DNS answers to different people—lying about where your servers are so users get faster responses.
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