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Cloud Computing & DevOps vocabulary · Scaling and Performance

Load balancer

Meaning in cloud computing & devops, with examples

/ˈloʊd ˌbælənsər/nounCore term

In cloud computing & devops, load balancer means: A service that receives incoming traffic and spreads it across several servers, sending requests only to the ones that are healthy.

In Turkish: yük dengeleyici, load balancer

How it is used

Sits in front of web servers or pods. Engineers put servers 'behind a load balancer' and configure health checks and listeners. Examples are AWS Application Load Balancer, Nginx and HAProxy. Often shortened to LB.

Example sentences

  1. The load balancer took the broken server out of rotation after three failed health checks.

  2. We put two more instances behind the load balancer before the sale started.

Common collocations

  • behind a load balancer
  • application load balancer
  • load balancer health check
  • configure a load balancer
  • health checkA regular automatic test, often a request to a special URL such as /health, that checks whether a server or service is working and able to take traffic.
  • scale outTo handle more load by adding more servers, containers or instances that share the work, rather than making one machine bigger.
  • autoscalingAutomatically adding servers or containers when demand rises and removing them when it falls, based on rules such as CPU use or number of requests.
  • high availabilityDesigning a system so that it stays up almost all the time, with no single part whose failure can stop the whole service.
  • serverA computer, physical or virtual, that runs services and answers requests from other computers over a network, for example by sending web pages or data.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Scaling and Performance

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