Load Balancing

Distribute traffic across application servers for high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance.

When to Use

• Distributing HTTP/HTTPS traffic across multiple backend servers.
• Implementing health checks to route around unhealthy instances.
• Terminating TLS at the load balancer for simplified certificate management.
• Enabling blue/green or canary deployments with traffic shifting.
• Scaling horizontally behind a single entry point.

Prerequisites

• Two or more backend servers running the same application.
• TLS certificate for HTTPS termination (ACM, Let's Encrypt, or self-signed for internal).
• For AWS: VPC with public and private subnets across availability zones.
• For nginx/HAProxy: Linux server with root access.