Imagine a busy restaurant with many customers arriving at the same time. The restaurant manager wants to make sure no single waiter is overwhelmed. How does this relate to load balancers in system design?
Why do load balancers distribute traffic among servers?
Think about how sharing work helps avoid overload.
Load balancers distribute traffic to prevent any single server from getting overwhelmed, ensuring better performance and reliability.
Given a system with multiple web servers, which architecture diagram best represents how a load balancer distributes incoming user requests?
Think about the role of the load balancer as the traffic controller.
The load balancer acts as a single entry point that distributes requests to multiple servers, balancing the load.
Consider a web application experiencing increasing user traffic. How does introducing a load balancer help the system scale effectively?
Think about how sharing work helps handle more users.
Load balancers enable horizontal scaling by distributing traffic to multiple servers, allowing the system to handle more users smoothly.
While load balancers improve traffic distribution, what is a common tradeoff or challenge introduced by using them?
Think about what happens if the traffic controller stops working.
If a load balancer fails and there is no backup, the entire system can become unreachable, so redundancy is important.
A system expects 10,000 requests per second. Each backend server can handle 2,000 requests per second. How many backend servers should the load balancer distribute traffic to, at minimum, to handle the load without overload?
Divide total requests by server capacity and round up.
10,000 requests / 2,000 per server = 5 servers needed to handle the load without overload.