A load balancer is a system that distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers or other computing resources, in order to improve the performance, reliability, and availability of a network application. Load balancers are commonly used in web applications, to distribute incoming requests from clients across multiple back-end servers, to ensure that the application can handle a large number of users without performance degradation.
Load balancers use various algorithms and techniques to determine how to distribute traffic among the available servers or resources. For example, a load balancer might use a round-robin algorithm to evenly distribute traffic among the servers, or a more advanced algorithm that takes into account the current load and performance of each server.
Load balancers can also provide other features and benefits, such as SSL/TLS termination, caching, compression, and security. Overall, load balancers are an important component of any large-scale network application, as they help to ensure that the application is scalable, available, and performant.
There are many different load balancer solutions available, both commercial and open-source. Some examples of popular load balancers include:
- NGINX
- HAProxy
- F5 BIG-IP
- AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)
- Azure Load Balancer
- Google Cloud Load Balancer
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