Level 1: Foundations · L1.3 Load balancing, reverse proxies, API gateways
Load balancing algorithms
Compare round robin, least connections and hashing, with health checks.
12 min · Free
What you take away
- Round robin spreads requests evenly, which only spreads load evenly when requests cost the same.
- Least connections tracks what each server is still working on, so it adapts to uneven request cost.
- Hashing sends the same key to the same server — needed for locality, and the source of hot instances.
- Health checks decide who is in the pool, and a check that is too deep can remove every instance at once.
How the class is laid out
- The problem
- The simple version
- The algorithms
- Who is in the pool
- Check your understanding