How can you use load balancing to optimize server performance?

Load balancing is essential for optimal server performance. It evenly distributes requests among servers, preventing overload and ensuring fast, consistent service. It's like a coach managing players, maximizing efficiency and reliability.

Load balancing ensures efficient utilization of server resources by preventing underutilized servers while optimizing the workload on heavily used ones, leading to cost savings and improved hardware efficiency.

Load balancing is a layer before you reach your application it is used by the services that handle a large number of requests and have multiple servers or multiple pods running the application. They follow multiple approach for load balancing like rotation between server or logic based on data in case the data is segmented between servers or services.

Load balancing has been around for many years, with initial implementations using simple round-robin allocation of workloads across a fixed number of hosts. Although effective, additional logic improves this implementation by aligning work to hosts that are underutilized and available to take on more of the workload, thus improving the customer experience. Other types of logic can look at the number of connections, CPU, and memory to make informed decisions on where to balance a workload. Lastly, engineers can use load balancing both locally and globally to provide additional layers of protection, not only to ensure performance but to support overall resiliency.

It is agreed that despite load balancing being an effective solution for a smoother User Experience, reducing latency in UX and API calls, it does come with a few challenges just like any other solution in the world. In my experience from the Operations Management standpoint, while building automated Service Maps to enforce visibility and health checks, the presence of a load balancer only lets the penetration be possible through one of the webservers or paths, and this makes it very difficult to monitor the standby servers where the session does not lead. This may cause substantial risk in the case that the standby server is not ready for support(ill) and this wouldn't show up in monitoring. (Sticky session handling could be a workaround)

I think load balancers are essential for any enterprise based applications, to optimize server performance its the load balancing method (eg resources based adaptive or sdn adaptive) which is key to improve servers performance.

Learning essential load balancing skills requires the knowledge of system design so do check that out before you do this, it'll help you a lot.