Glossary of terms

Load Balancing

Load Balancing is the process of distributing traffic between multiple servers or other resources.

The main functions of load balancing are:

Increase availability:

Load balancing can help ensure that your servers and applications are always available to users, even if one or more servers go down.

Improved performance:

Load balancing can help distribute traffic across your servers, which can lead to improved performance and response times for users.

Increased scalability:

Load balancing can help you easily scale your applications by adding new servers to your cluster.
Improved security: Load balancing can help protect your servers from overloads and DDoS attacks.

There are two main types of load balancing:

IP-based load balancing:

This type of load balancing distributes traffic based on the IP address of the request.

Debugging-based load balancing:

This type of load balancing distributes traffic based on configured data, such as request type or server state.

The scope of load balancing:

Websites and web applications:

Load balancing is widely used for websites and web applications to distribute traffic across multiple web servers. This can help ensure that the site will be available to users even if one or more web servers go down. Load balancing can also help distribute traffic between servers, which can lead to improved performance and response times for users.

Mobile applications:

Load balancing can be used for mobile applications to distribute traffic between API servers and database servers. This can help ensure that the application will be available to users even if one or more servers go down. Load balancing can also help distribute traffic between servers, which can lead to improved performance and response times for users.

Gaming:

Load balancing can be used for games to distribute traffic between game servers. This can help ensure that the game will be available to players even if one or more game servers go down. Load balancing can also help distribute traffic between servers, which can lead to improved gameplay and reduced latency.

Big data systems:

Load balancing can be used for big data systems to distribute traffic across clusters of servers. This can help ensure that the system will be available to users even if one or more server clusters fail. Load balancing can also help distribute traffic between servers, which can lead to improved performance and data processing times.

Other applications:

Load balancing can be used to distribute traffic across any type of server or resource where availability, performance, and scalability are important.

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