2. Load Balancer
Load balancing distributes server loads across multiple resources — most often across multiple servers. The technique aims to reduce response time, increase throughput, and in general speed things up for each end user.
Modern high‑traffic websites must serve hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of concurrent requests from users or clients and return the correct text, images, video, or application data, all in a fast and reliable manner. To cost‑effectively scale to meet these high volumes, modern computing best practice generally requires adding more servers.
Loads are broken up based on a set of predefined metrics, such as by geographical location, or by the number of concurrent site visitors.
Members of a certain group — such as ‘people living in Europe’, for example, may be directed to a server within Europe, while members of another group take, for instance, ‘North Americans’ may be directed to another server, closer to them.
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
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