Load Balancers

Q&A: What is a load balancer, and what algorithms/strategies does it use to distribute traffic?

Expected discussion: Sits in front of a pool of servers, distributing incoming requests using strategies like round-robin, least-connections, IP-hash, weighted, or latency-based routing. Performs health checks to route around unhealthy instances. Can operate at L4 (transport layer) or L7 (application layer), and is a key building block for horizontal scaling and high availability.