sysdesign-load-balancers

Choosing the right load balancer requires classifying your needs into hardware, LBaaS, or software options based on your deployment environment and scale. This evaluates traffic characteristics and infrastructure integration to determine the optimal load balancer solution.

Selecting L4 or L7 load balancing depends on your routing trade-offs and operational implications. L4 offers faster network-level routing, while L7 enables application-level traffic steering, aligning with high-availability and performance goals for your workload.

Configuring TLS termination and session handling requires evaluating compliance and application requirements. This guides optimal placement for TLS termination and sticky session handling to align with security policies and multi-replica service demands.

The best health-check and redundancy strategies involve planning health checks and configuring redundant load balancer deployments. This avoids single points of failure in production by integrating with existing observability and security policies.

A hardware load balancer offers robust high availability but lacks the elasticity of LBaaS. Choosing between hardware and LBaaS depends on your system design scale, cloud or on-prem environment, and specific traffic routing requirements.