LISA18

Can you explain the entire path that an IP packet takes from your users to your binary? What about a web request? Do you understand the tradeoffs that different kinds of load balancing techniques make? If not, this talk is for you.


Load balancing is hard, and it is made up of many disparate technologies. It cuts across network, transport and application layers. We'll describe different flavours of load balancing (network, naming, application) and how they work.


We will then discuss example use cases, and which load balancing approaches are most appropriate in each case. We'll also relate these to several design patterns for high-availability services that have developed over the years. Finally, we'll relate the techniques we've been discussing to well-known open source technologies and to the major cloud load balancing services.