Load Balancers

Relentlessly distributing network requests across multiple servers, these digital traffic cops act as watchful guardians for your system, ensuring that it operates at peak performance day and night.

Load Balancer

A type of reverse proxy that distributes traffic across servers. Load balancers can be found in many parts of a system, from the DNS layer all the way to the database layer.

Server Selection Strategy

How a load balancer chooses servers when distributing traffic amongst multiple servers. Commonly used strategies include round-robin, random selection, performance-based selection (choosing the server with the best performance metrics, like the fastest response time or the least amount of traffic), and IP-based routing.

Hot Spot

When distributing a workload across a set of servers, that workload might be spread unevenly. This can happen if your sharding key or your hashing function are suboptimal, or if your workload is naturally skewed: some servers will receive a lot more traffic than others, thus creating a "hot spot".