All terms
Glossary
Load balancer
A distributor that spreads incoming requests across instances and takes failed ones out of rotation.
Besides distribution it usually terminates encryption and runs health checks against the instances behind it.
It is the place where deployment strategies such as blue-green or canary are technically implemented.
How you notice it
- Several instances of the same application are running.
- Failures of individual instances should reach nobody.
- TLS should terminate in one place.
Frequently asked
What must a health check cover?
The path down to the most important dependency. A check that only confirms the process answers reports healthy while the database connection is dead. An endpoint that runs one real, cheap query prevents exactly that.