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Networking Intermediate

What is Load Balancer?

A device or software that distributes network traffic across multiple servers to ensure reliability and performance.

Load balancers distribute incoming requests across a pool of backend servers. This prevents any single server from becoming overwhelmed, improves response times, and provides redundancy.

Algorithms include round-robin, least connections, weighted, and IP hash. Popular solutions include Nginx, HAProxy, AWS ELB, and F5. Load balancers operate at Layer 4 (transport) or Layer 7 (application).

Related Terms

Network Monitoring
The practice of continuously observing network infrastructure to detect failures, performance degradation, and security threats.
DNS Propagation
The time it takes for DNS record changes to spread across all DNS servers worldwide, typically taking up to 48 hours.
NAT (Network Address Translation)
A method of mapping private IP addresses to public IP addresses, allowing multiple devices to share a single public IP.
MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit)
The maximum size of a data packet that can be transmitted over a network without fragmentation.
Network Segmentation
The practice of dividing a network into isolated segments to improve security, performance, and management.
ARP (Address Resolution Protocol)
A protocol that maps IP addresses to physical MAC addresses on a local network segment.
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