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System Design 101
System Design Basics: Getting started with Load Balancer
How popular sites handle huge number of requests
System design is one of the most important concepts of software engineering. When I started my associate architecture course, I had a hard time understanding how you design a system. One of the main problems was that the terminology used in the system design resources is hard to understand at first.
This article examines an important topic of system design, the Load Balancer. You may know about its characteristics and techniques of server selection here. Familiarizing yourself with the basic concepts and terminologies of system design would greatly help in designing a system.
Load Balancer
A load balancer is a vital component of any distributed system. It helps to distribute the client requests within a cluster of servers to improve the responsiveness and availability of applications or websites.
According to Wikipedia, “Load balancing refers to the process of distributing a set of tasks over a set of resources.”
For example, if one server can not serve a lot of requests at the same time, we need a load balancer. Its primary purpose is to optimize the response time of each task. Now let’s assume a system has one server that is overloaded with the request of clients. The server has a limit of serving requests per second. So, we need to add more servers to handle large amounts of requests. But we may need a load balancer to balance the loads between the servers.
The load balancer is a server that usually sits between client devices and a set of servers and distributes client requests across servers. Load balancers can be placed in various places of a system. The loads on the servers need to be distributed in a balanced way; that’s why they are called a load balancer.
