Load Balancing Basics for Backend Developers

A single server can only handle so much traffic before CPU and memory limits cause requests to queue and eventually drop.

• Load balancers sit in front of your server pool and distribute incoming traffic evenly using algorithms like Round Robin or Least Connections.
• They provide vital health checks. If a server in your cluster crashes, the load balancer automatically stops routing traffic to it, ensuring users never see a 502 Bad Gateway error.
• Modern infrastructure relies on Layer 7 load balancing to route traffic based on HTTP headers or URL paths, enabling sophisticated microservice architectures.