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Software Engineering vocabulary · Release and Maintenance

Load balancer

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈloʊd ˌbælənsər/nounCore term

In software engineering, 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 database system so that it keeps working with very little downtime, even if a server, disk or data center fails.
  • serverA computer or program that waits for requests from browsers and other clients and sends back pages, files or data.

This word in other fields

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

More terms: Release and Maintenance

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