⬡ ScalingCore interactive
Load Balancing
Spread traffic across servers, no single hotspot.
load_balancer
round-robin
clients
LB
Requests spread across the pool — no single server becomes a hotspot.
How it works
A load balancer sits in front of a server pool and distributes incoming requests so no one machine is overwhelmed. Strategies range from round-robin to least-connections to weighted routing, with health checks that pull dead nodes out of rotation.
Mental models
- Round-robin, least-connections, IP-hash, and weighted are the staples.
- Health checks + automatic failover keep traffic off dead servers.
- L4 balances on IP/port; L7 understands HTTP paths and cookies.
Reach for it when
- Horizontal scaling
- Zero-downtime deploys
- Geographic routing