Load Balancing & High Availability: Keeping Your Services Online 24/7

Load balancing distributes traffic across multiple servers to improve performance and availability. Combined with health checks and failover, it helps keep services resilient.

Key concepts

• Algorithms: round-robin, least-connections, IP-hash
• Health checks: active and passive checks to remove unhealthy instances
• Session affinity: sticky sessions vs stateless design
• Geo load balancing for global users

Use cloud-managed load balancers for simplicity or NGINX/HAProxy for advanced control.