What is Load Balancing?

Load balancing is the process of distributing network traffic across multiple servers or network resources to optimize resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and ensure high availability of applications or services. It is used to balance the workload of servers to avoid overloading a single server and prevent downtime due to hardware failures, network congestion, or other issues.

Load balancing can be achieved by various methods such as round-robin, weighted round-robin, IP hash, least connections, and others. Load balancers act as intermediaries between the client and the servers and they distribute the requests based on specific algorithms to ensure that each server receives an equal share of traffic. Load balancing can be implemented at different layers of the network stack, such as the application layer, transport layer, or network layer, depending on the specific requirements of the application or service.