Load Balancer Algorithm
The strategy a load balancer uses to distribute requests. Round-robin, least-connections, weighted, IP-hash, and random are common algorithms, each with different trade-offs.
What is Load Balancer Algorithm?
The strategy a load balancer uses to distribute requests. Round-robin, least-connections, weighted, IP-hash, and random are common algorithms, each with different trade-offs.
Load Balancer Algorithm 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 "Load Balancer Algorithm" 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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See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
Load Balancer
Distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers so no single server gets overwhelmed. Like a traffic cop directing cars to different lanes.
Round Robin
A load balancing algorithm that distributes requests to servers in sequential order, cycling through the list. Simple but ignores server capacity differences.
Consistent Hashing
A hashing technique where adding or removing servers only moves a small fraction of keys. Used by Amazon DynamoDB and Cassandra for data distribution.