Load Balancers

Question 1

What is a load balancer?

Answer 1

A device or software that distributes network traffic equally across a pool of resources.

Question 2

What are some common algorithms for load balancing?

Answer 2

1. Round Robin - Cycle through machines distributing traffic to each as you go.
2. Least Connections / Response Time - Send requests to the machine with the least connections.
3. Hashing - Hash an arbitrary key (To create a random, hopefully more uniformly distributed) value hash, and use modulos to determine the server.