A component that distributes incoming network or application traffic across multiple backend servers to improve throughput, reliability, and resource utilisation, preventing any single server from becoming a bottleneck.
Semantic Classification
Content
- A load balancer sits in front of a pool of backend servers and routes client requests according to a scheduling policy such as round robin, least connections or hashing. By spreading load it prevents any single server from becoming a bottleneck and can remove failed instances from rotation.
- Load balancers operate at the transport layer or the application layer, support health checks and session persistence, and are fundamental to scalable, highly available services and microservice deployments.