Load Balancing
In plain terms
Distributing incoming work across multiple servers.
Going deeper
Load balancing spreads requests so no single server is overwhelmed, improving throughput and reliability. Strategies include round-robin, least-connections, and health-aware routing.
Under the hood
Algorithm choice (round-robin, least-connections, IP-hash, weighted) and health checks affect distribution; session affinity complicates stateless scaling.
Examples
NGINX upstream, HAProxy, AWS ALB, DNS round-robin, Kubernetes Services.
Think of it like...
Like a supermarket directing shoppers to whichever checkout has the shortest line.