Load balancing refers to efficiently distributing incoming network traffic across a group of backend servers, also known as a server farm or server pool.

A load balancer acts as the “traffic cop” sitting in front of your servers and routing client requests across all servers capable of fulfilling those requests in a manner that maximizes speed and capacity utilization and ensures that no one server is overworked, which could degrade performance. If a single server goes down, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining online servers. When a new server is added to the server group, the load balancer automatically starts to send requests to it.

  • In this manner, a load balancer performs the following functions:
  • Distributes client requests or network load efficiently across multiple servers.
  • Ensures high availability and reliability by sending requests only to servers that are online.
  • Provides the flexibility to add or subtract servers as demand dictates.