Load balancing is the process of distributing network or application traffic across multiple servers to ensure no single device becomes a bottleneck. It enhances performance, reliability, and availability by ensuring that workloads are handled efficiently, even during peak demand.
In simple terms, load balancing acts as a traffic manager for data requests, deciding which server should handle each request based on current load, availability, and performance. When one server goes down, the load balancer automatically redirects traffic to healthy servers, keeping services uninterrupted.
Business Relevance
For enterprises, load balancing is crucial for maintaining uptime and delivering consistent user experiences. It supports digital services, cloud applications, and customer portals that must remain available around the clock. In sectors like e-commerce, banking, and healthcare, even a few seconds of downtime can lead to lost revenue or trust.
Modern load balancers go beyond basic traffic distribution. They perform health checks, SSL offloading, application-layer filtering, and even integrate with Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) to enhance security. Many organisations now use software-based or cloud-native load balancers as part of their hybrid and multi-cloud architectures.
Types of Load Balancing
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Network load balancing: Distributes traffic at the transport layer (Layer 4), focusing on IP and TCP/UDP connections.
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Application load balancing: Operates at the application layer (Layer 7), making routing decisions based on content such as URLs or HTTP headers.
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Global load balancing: Spreads requests across data centres in different regions for redundancy and performance optimisation.
Considerations
Choosing the right load balancing strategy depends on workload type, network topology, and scalability needs. Cloud adoption has made elasticity and automation key priorities, with solutions from providers like Cisco, F5, and AWS offering advanced analytics and AI-driven optimisation.
