Load BALANCING refers to the concept of distributing incoming traffic efficiently ACROSS a group of various backend servers. These servers are called server pools. Modern-day websites are designed to serve millions of requests from clients and RETURN the RESPONSES in a fast and reliable manner. In order to serve these requests, the addition of more servers is required. In such a scenario, it is essential to distribute request traffic efficiently across each server so that they do not face undue loads. Load balancer acts as a traffic police cop facing the requests and routes them across the available servers in a way that not a single server is overwhelmed which could possibly degrade the application performance.

When a server goes down, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining available servers. When a new server gets added to the configuration, the requests are automatically redirected to it. Following are the benefits of load balancers:

• They help to prevent requests from going to unhealthy or unavailable servers.
• Helps to prevent resources overloading.
• Helps to eliminate a single point of failure since the requests are routed to available servers whenever a server goes down.
• Requests sent to the servers are encrypted and the responses are decrypted. It aids in SSL termination and removes the NEED to install X.509 certificates on every server.
• Load balancing impacts system security and allows continuous software updates for accomodating changes in the system.