What will happen if there is NO Load Balancer?
Before understanding how a load balancer works, let’s understand what problem will occur without the load balancer through an example.
Consider a scenario where an application is running on a single server and the client connects to that server directly without load balancing.
There are two main problems with this model:
- Single Point of Failure:
- If the server goes down or something happens to the server the whole application will be interrupted and it will become unavailable for the users for a certain period. It will create a bad experience for users which is unacceptable for service providers.
- Overloaded Servers:
- There will be a limitation on the number of requests that a web server can handle. If the business grows and the number of requests increases the server will be overloaded.
- To solve the increasing number of requests we need to add a few more servers and we need to distribute the requests to the cluster of servers.
What is Load Balancer & How Load Balancing works?
Load Balancer is defined as a networking device or software application that distributes and balances the incoming traffic among the servers to provide high availability, efficient utilization of servers, and high performance. A load balancer works as a “traffic cop” sitting in front of your server and routing client requests across all servers. It simply distributes the set of requested operations (database write requests, cache queries) effectively across multiple servers and ensures that no single server bears too many requests.
Important Topics for Load Balancer
- What is a Load Balancer?
- What will happen if there is NO Load Balancer?
- Key characteristics of Load Balancers:
- How Load Balancer Works?
- Types of Load Balancers
- Load Balancing Algorithms
- Benefits of using a Load Balancer
- Cons/Drawbacks of Load Balancers:
- Conclusion