Load balancing

What is load balancing?

Load balancing is a technique used to distribute network traffic across a pool of servers known as a?server pool (collection of servers or services). It optimizes network performance, reliability and capacity, reducing?latancy?as the demand is equally distributed among multiple servers and compute resources

How load balancing works

Load balancers handle incoming requests from users for information and other services. They sit between the servers that handle those requests and the internet. Once a request is received, the load balancer first determines which server in a pool is available and online and then routes the request to that server. During times of heavy loads, a load balancer acts promptly and can dynamically add servers in response to spikes in traffic. Conversely, load balancers can drop servers if demand is low.

HTTP Load Balancing using Nginx (web server and a reverse proxy server)

To load balance HTTP traffic to a group of servers, first you need to define the group with the upstream?directive. The directive is placed in the http?context

By default, NGINX distributes requests among the servers in the group according to their weights using the Round?Robin method. The?weight?parameter to the?server?directive sets the weight of a server; the default is?1:

NGINX supports six load?balancing methods

1. Round Robin
2. Least Connections
3. IP Hash
4. Generic?Hash
5. Least Time
6. Random