Load Balancing

Kind: mechanism

Layer: Performance Core

Record: architecture:load-balancing

Severity: contextual

Scope: traffic, service

Canonical: Ontology

A mechanism that spreads incoming requests across healthy instances of a service.

Listed in Architecture principles, after Elasticity and before Sharding.

Requires

• Multiple Targets
• Health Checks

Reinforces

• Availability
• Scalability

Enables

• Traffic Distribution

Conflicts with

• Single Target Routing

In tension with

• Session Affinity

Tensions

• Load Balancing / Session Affinity

Violated by

• Single Target Routing

Refactored by

• Externalize Session State

Severity

• contextual

Category

• Scalability / Performance / Optimization

Reinforced by

• Competing Consumers
• Read Replica

Refactors

• Horizontal Scaling

Enabled by

• Statelessness

Linked from

• Event / Messaging / Asynchronous Architecture
• Scalability / Performance / Optimization
• Self-Healing / Recovery / Deployment Safety
• Quality Attributes
• Scalability / Performance / Optimization
• Severity levels
• The resolutions