Global Load Balancer
A load balancer that routes users to the nearest data center or region based on geography, latency, or health. DNS-based (Route 53, Cloudflare) or anycast-based.
What is Global Load Balancer?
A load balancer that routes users to the nearest data center or region based on geography, latency, or health. DNS-based (Route 53, Cloudflare) or anycast-based.
Global Load Balancer is a foundational concept that sits in the Load Balancing & Proxies area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Global Load Balancer" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
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Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
Open the Global Load Balancer lessonSee also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
DNS
The phonebook of the internet. Translates human-readable domain names (google.com) into IP addresses that computers understand.
CDN
A network of servers distributed globally that caches content close to users. Netflix uses CDNs to stream video from servers near you, not from one central location.
Cloud Region
A geographic area containing one or more data centers (availability zones). Choosing the right region reduces latency and satisfies data residency requirements.