Backend & systems·Scaling and load management
one address takes all the traffic and spreads it across the instances, skipping the ones failing their health check.
Load balancer
Also calledreverse proxy, L4 vs L7
A component distributing requests across backends and removing unhealthy ones from rotation. Layer 4 balances connections and is fast and protocol-agnostic; layer 7 understands HTTP and can route, retry and rewrite. Its algorithm matters under uneven request costs: round robin sends work to a saturated instance, least-connections does not.