Load Balancer
Spread traffic across servers with L4/L7 balancing, health checks and algorithms.
All topics · 2 lessons · 31 resources
Learn Load Balancer on System Design Atlas
- 01From one server to many: scaling and load balancingVertical versus horizontal scaling, why stateless servers matter, and how a load balancer spreads traffic.System Design Foundations · 10 min read · start here
- 02Load balancing: layer 4, layer 7 and gatewaysWhat a load balancer can see and do at each layer, the algorithms behind it, and how API gateways add routing, aggregation and policy.Advanced Distributed Systems · 12 min read
Related topics
These share a lesson with Load Balancer.
Curated Load Balancer resources
YouTube
- Interview PenFull system design walkthroughs with whiteboard diagrams and a clear structure.Interview Pen
- Scaling Load Balancing Infra to Support 1.3 Billion Users at Facebook - Patrick Shuff, Production Engineer at FacebookWant to learn how Facebook scales their load balancing infrastructure to support more than 1.3 billion users? We will be revealing the technologies and metho...Facebook
- Hussein Nasser: Backend Engineering ShowProtocols, proxies, databases and load balancers explained from first principles.Hussein Nasser (YouTube)
- Gaurav Sen: System Design PlaylistInterview-oriented walkthroughs of consistent hashing, load balancing, sharding and classic designs.Gaurav Sen (YouTube)
Blogs
- Scalable Web Architecture and Distributed SystemsA full chapter on the building blocks of large websites: availability, performance, reliability, scalability, caches, proxies, indexes, load balancers and queues. Free to read here under CC BY 3.0.The Architecture of Open Source Applications
- AWS Networking BlogModernizing a monolith into microservices may require placing each new service in its own AWS account for isolation, independent scaling, and clear ownership. During that migration you hit a hard question: how do you shift a small, precise slice of live traffic from the monolith to a new service in a different…Amazon Web Services
- Google SRE Book: Handling OverloadClient-side throttling, per-client quotas and criticality levels for staying up when demand exceeds capacity.Google
- Google SRE Book: Load Balancing in the DatacenterAlgorithms for spreading requests inside a data centre, including subsetting and weighted round robin.Google
- Implementing health checksKinds of health checks, how load balancers use them, and how a careless check can take down a whole fleet.Amazon Web Services
- Rate Limiting with NGINXConfiguring request limits and bursts in NGINX with the leaky-bucket model.F5 / NGINX
- High ScalabilityLong-running blog dissecting the architectures of large internet companies.High Scalability
Case Studies
- Deterministic Aperture: A Distributed, Load Balancing Algorithm at TwitterAs parts of the Twitter application grow, we can scale demands on capacity by adding more instances or replicas to a respective service cluster (i.e., horizontal scaling)Twitter
- Intelligent DNS based load balancing at DropboxThe Dropbox Traffic team is charged with innovating our application networking stack to improve the experience for every one of our users—over half a billion of them. This article describes our work with NS1 to optimize our intelligent DNS-based global load balancing for corner cases that we uncovered while…Dropbox
- Load BalancingThis post is going to look at one aspect of how sites like Facebook handle billions of requests and stay highly available: load balancing.Vivekpanyam
- Load Balancing at GithubOver the last year we've developed our new load balancer, called GLB (GitHub Load Balancer).Github
- Load Balancing infrastructure to support more than 1.3 billion users at FacebookA SREcon talk on how Facebook's traffic team uses DNS and software load balancers to route and balance global traffic for over a billion users.Facebook
- Monitor DNS systems at StripeThe secret life of DNS packets: investigating complex networks.Stripe
- Top Five (Load Balancing) Scalability PatternsMaster the top five scalability patterns for modern applications. Read the F5 blog to learn how to build highly available and resilient digital architectures.F5
- Traffic Infrastructure (Edge Network) at DropboxAs you can see, by simply putting the PoP close to the user one can improve latency by more than factor of two.Dropbox
- Traffic Steering using Rum DNS at LinkedInDo you serve customers across the world with varying network conditions? Do you struggle with automatically sending your users away from an unavailable POP/DC to the next best one? Wouldn’t it be great if you magically knew about the regional issues related to last mile connectivity from the users?LinkedIn
- Active-Active for Multi-Regional ResiliencyHow Netflix routes traffic across regions and survives regional outages.Netflix
GitHub
- Envoy ProxyThe source of the high-performance proxy behind many service meshes.CNCF / Envoy
- Awesome System Design ResourcesConcepts, patterns and case-study links organised for interview preparation.ashishps1
- The System Design PrimerThe most-starred system design study guide: scalability concepts, trade-offs and Anki flashcards.donnemartin
Documentation
- HAProxyThe home of the widely used open-source load balancer and proxy.HAProxy
- Kubernetes: IngressRouting external HTTP traffic to services inside a cluster.CNCF / Kubernetes
- What is EnvoyThe proxy behind many service meshes and gateways, and its core ideas.CNCF / Envoy
- NGINX HTTP Load BalancingConfigure round robin, least connections, IP hash and health checks in NGINX.F5 / NGINX
- Google Cloud Architecture FrameworkDesign principles for reliability, performance and operational excellence on GCP.Google Cloud