Load Balancing and Service Discovery
Understand L4 vs L7 load balancing, routing algorithms, health checks, and how services find each other in distributed systems.
15 min readarchitecture, system-design, load-balancing, service-discovery
When your application runs on multiple servers, something needs to distribute traffic across them. When services need to communicate with each other, something needs to help them find each other. Load balancing and service discovery are the plumbing that makes horizontally scaled systems work.
Load Balancing Fundamentals
A load balancer sits between clients and servers, distributing incoming requests across multiple backend instances.
┌──────────────┐
│ Server 1 │
┌───▶│ (healthy) │
┌────────┐ ┌─────┤ └──────────────┘
│ Client │───▶│ Load│ ┌──────────────┐
│ │ │Balan├───▶│ Server 2 │
│ │◀───│cer │ │ (healthy) │
└────────┘ └─────┤ └──────────────┘
This lesson is part of the Guild Member curriculum. Plans start at $29/mo.