Load Balancing Strategies

Overview

Load balancing distributes traffic across multiple targets to improve availability, performance, and resilience. This guide covers algorithms, health checks, and operational best practices.

Table of Contents

1. Fundamentals
2. Layer 4 vs Layer 7
3. Algorithms
4. Health Checks
5. Session Persistence
6. TLS Termination
7. Connection Draining
8. Global Load Balancing
9. Cloud Load Balancers
10. Software Load Balancers
11. Service Mesh Load Balancing
12. Autoscaling Integration
13. Monitoring
14. Troubleshooting

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Fundamentals

Core goals:

• Spread traffic evenly
• Avoid single points of failure
• Improve latency by routing to healthy targets

Layer 4 vs Layer 7

• Layer 4 (TCP/UDP): Fast, protocol-agnostic, no HTTP awareness.
• Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS): Route by path/host/headers, supports TLS termination.

Algorithms

Common strategies:

• Round Robin: Simple rotation.
• Weighted Round Robin: Bias to stronger nodes.
• Least Connections: Route to least busy.
• Weighted Least Connections: Combine weight + load.
• IP Hash: Sticky routing by client IP.
• Random: Low overhead.
• Least Response Time: Prefer lowest latency target.

Health Checks

Types:

• Active: Probes at intervals.
• Passive: Detect failures from live traffic.

Use both for best detection and recovery.

Session Persistence

Sticky sessions route a client to the same target:

• Cookie-based affinity
• IP hash

Use only when state cannot be externalized.

TLS Termination

Terminate TLS at the load balancer for:

• Centralized cert management
• Better performance
• Easier observability

Optionally re-encrypt to backend for end-to-end security.

Connection Draining

Allow in-flight requests to finish during scale-down or deploy:

• Set drain timeout
• Stop new connections

Global Load Balancing

GSLB routes across regions:

• Geo-based routing
• Latency-based routing
• Failover routing

Cloud Load Balancers

• AWS: ALB (L7), NLB (L4)
• GCP: HTTP(S) Load Balancer, TCP/UDP LB
• Azure: Application Gateway, Azure Load Balancer

Software Load Balancers

• NGINX: Popular L7 proxy with health checks.
• HAProxy: High performance L4/L7.
• Envoy: Modern proxy with rich telemetry.

Service Mesh Load Balancing

Service meshes (Istio, Linkerd) provide client-side load balancing with retry policies, circuit breaking, and telemetry.

Autoscaling Integration

Combine with autoscaling:

• Scale on CPU, latency, or queue depth
• Pre-warm nodes to reduce cold starts

Monitoring

Track:

• Request rate and latency
• Backend error rates
• Health check failures
• Uneven traffic distribution

Troubleshooting

Common issues:

• Misconfigured health checks (false negatives)
• Sticky sessions causing hot spots
• TLS mismatch or SNI routing errors
• Draining too short for long requests

Related Skills

• 09-microservices/api-gateway

• 09-microservices/service-mesh

• 15-devops-infrastructure/kubernetes-helm