Round-robin, least-connections, consistent hashing — distribute traffic effectively across backend instances.
Five passes over the same idea, each from a different angle. Do them in order, or jump to whichever you need.
Load balancing distributes incoming requests across multiple servers. Layer 4 (TCP) vs Layer 7 (HTTP) balancing have different trade-offs. Algorithms include round-robin, weighted, least-connections, IP hash, and consistent hashing. Health checks, session affinity, and graceful draining are production essentials.
