Recently, I had a conversation with my junior about load balancing, a concept he was new to. To ensure clarity, I conducted some research to explain it in simple terms, and I’m sharing it here for reference.
Firstly, What is Load Balancing and Why is it Necessary?
Imagine you have a restaurant with a long line of hungry customers. Instead of making one chef handle all the orders, you have several chefs ready to cook! A load balancer is like the head waiter in this situation. They take each new customer’s order (a request) and decide which chef is best suited to handle it. They might:
Spread the work evenly: Send orders to different chefs in a round-robin fashion, so no one gets overloaded.
Send urgent orders first: If someone orders something quick, like fries, they might get directed to a chef who’s already finishing up another order.
Choose the “strongest” chef: If an order is complex, like a steak, it might go to the chef with the most experience.
This way, all the chefs stay busy but not overwhelmed, and everyone gets their food faster!
In software development, load balancing works the same way. Imagine a website with lots of visitors, all sending requests. A load balancer acts like a traffic cop, directing each request to one of several servers instead of overwhelming just one. This keeps the website running smoothly and quickly for everyone.
Here are some key points about load balancing:
- Distributes tasks: Spreads work across multiple servers or resources.
- Improves performance: Makes things faster by sharing the load.
- Increases reliability: Keeps things running even if one server fails.
- Like a traffic cop: Directs requests to the most available server.
Secondly, How to set up Load Balancing:
There are various options for setting up a load balancer. For instance:
- DigitalOcean: Easily create a load balancer and add designated droplets directly. Here is the original documentation: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/networking/load-balancers/how-to/create
- NGINX: Build your own load balancer using NGINX. You can configure load balancing directly in nginx.conf or create a separate loadbalancer.conf. Here is the original documentation: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/load-balancer/http-load-balancer
AWS offers more complex load balancing services, however, I won’t delve into them here as I currently utilize DigitalOcean and NGINX for load balancing purposes.
Finally, Benefits of Load Balancing:
- Improved Performance: Distributes traffic load across servers, preventing overload and maintaining responsiveness.
- High Availability: Routes traffic to healthy servers if one fails, minimizing downtime.
- Scalability: Easily accommodates increased traffic by adding droplets without altering your application’s architecture.
That’s all for now. Thanks for taking the time to read.