Load Balancers, Explained
Load Balancers, Explained
The visual companion to the load balancer article: we build a tiny load balancer in code, watch traffic distribute under a live failing backend, and replay the classic cascade incident in a simulator.
Topics covered:
- Layer 4 vs layer 7 — what each one sees
- Health check contracts (liveness vs readiness vs draining)
- Stickiness and the hot-spot failure
- The cascade: one dead node, three dead nodes
- Consistent hashing with bounded churn
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