Load balancers simplified for product managers
What is a load balancer? What are load balancers used for? This is another very common technical interview question PMs encounter during PM interviews. Understand how load balancers work in only 2 minutes.
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What is a Load Balancer?
A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers to ensure applications are scalable, reliable, and performant. It checks the traffic load on the available servers and distributes incoming traffic to the servers with less traffic.
Benefits of Load balancers
Uptime & Reliability: Load balancers help prevent server overloads and ensure the application remains accessible even during traffic spikes or failures.
User Experience: Load balancers reduce latency and optimize resource allocation, enhancing application speed and responsiveness.
Scalability: Load balancers support your product's growth by dynamically managing workloads across additional servers.
How load balancers work
Traffic Reception: The load balancer receives incoming user requests.
Server Health Checks: It continuously monitors the health and performance of connected servers.
Smart Distribution: Based on server health, traffic is distributed using algorithms like round-robin, least connections, or location-based rules.
Dynamic Scaling: When traffic increases, load balancers allocate traffic to newly provisioned servers (auto-scaling).
Failover Handling: If a server goes down, traffic is instantly rerouted to healthy servers, ensuring uninterrupted service.
Real-life application of load balancers
Streaming Services (Netflix, YouTube): Load balancers dynamically distribute video streaming requests across global server locations to ensure uninterrupted playback and low latency.
E-commerce (Amazon, Shopify): Load balancers handle high transaction volumes during peak sales like Black Friday by balancing user requests across multiple servers and maintaining checkout speed.
Social Media (Facebook, Instagram): Load balancers manage billions of interactions, such as likes, posts, and comments, by distributing traffic across data centers.
Types of Load Balancers
Layer 4 (Network) Load balancers: Routes traffic based on IP and port rules. It’s fast but offers limited flexibility.
Layer 7 (Application) Load balancers: Routes traffic based on content (e.g., URLs, HTTP headers). This is ideal for web applications needing advanced routing.
Common load-balancing applications
AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB): Scalable and integrates with other AWS services.
Google Cloud Load Balancer: Global routing with real-time auto-scaling.
Azure Load Balancer: Best for Microsoft environments with hybrid support.
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Get Solutions to 7 popular PM interview questions using frameworks from PMs at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon PMs. Use discount code i2s85yu today only to get at a 50 % discount. Limited to 5 customers only
Get 4 case studies I submitted to hiring managers got me offers from different companies. Use discount code i2s85yu today only to get at a 50 % discount. Limited to 5 customers only
Free resources (worth at least 3500$) that helped me transition from customer success to Product Management (liked by 500+ people
Sample resume used by PMs to land a Microsoft offer. (Liked by 2000+ people)
Feedback from a PM in the United Kingdom who landed her first role through close mentorship
Free resources
Introduction to load balancers by IBM
Load balancers explained by Exponent podcast
What is load balancing