Load Balancer Algorithms

Introduction

Before I decided to switch to AWS for my personal projects, I studied system design. When studying system design the diagrams were slightly difficult to follow. I wanted more visuals, so I booted up Nginx and created a simple load balancer to help me understand the different algorithms through logs. This seemed like a huge hurdle just to see how each algorithm works, so I decided to create an interactive demo to help others understand load balancer algorithms.

Load balancers are used to distribute incoming network traffic across multiple servers. This is done to ensure that no single server is overwhelmed with requests. Load balancers can be implemented in software or hardware and can be used to distribute traffic across multiple servers, data centers, or even cloud providers.

Static Load Balancing

Static load balancing algorithms distribute traffic evenly across a set of servers. These algorithms do not take into account the current load on each server and are not able to adapt to changes in traffic patterns.

Round Robin

Round Robin is one of the simplest load balancing algorithms. It distributes incoming requests to a group of servers in a circular order. Each server is assigned a request in turn, and the cycle repeats.

Weighted Round Robin

Weighted Round Robin is an extension of the Round Robin algorithm that assigns a weight to each server. Servers with higher weights receive more requests per cycle than servers with lower weights. You can adjust the weights and cycle in the demo below to distribute traffic according to the capacity of each server.

Hashed Load Balancing

Hashed Load Balancing uses a hash function to hash an IP address an map incoming requests to a specific server. This ensures that requests for the same resource are always directed to the same server. Directing requests to the same server can be useful for caching or session management if they are performed on a per-server basis.

Demo

The demo is only available on my portfolio. Feel free to check it out here. I will soon add dynamic load balancing algorithms.