Load balancers

Load balancers are a type of technology used to distribute incoming network traffic across multiple servers in order to improve performance, reliability, and scalability. They act as intermediaries between clients and servers, distributing requests based on predefined rules and algorithms, such as round-robin, least connections, or IP hash. Load balancers can detect server failures and route traffic to healthy servers, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance. They can also perform SSL termination, caching, compression, and application-specific optimizations. Load balancers can be hardware appliances, software-based, or cloud-based services, and can be deployed at the network, transport, or application layer of the OSI model.