Load Balancing

1. Abstract

Revolves around the idea of balancing requests over a pool of resources to avoid the over-"load"ing of any single point of service.
Is placed between the client and a group of servers (server farm)
also see Reverse Proxy and how load balancing compares in the context of client-server architecture
A core component that defines a load balancer's behaviour is the way it balances traffics, i.e. the underlying scheduling algorithm
- it can either be static (uses a predefined strategy) or dynamic (routes traffic based on the current state of the load balancer)

monitor traffic and block malicious content : see Web Application Firewalls for an elaboration
redirect attack traffic to multiple backend servers to minimize impact

traffic can be distribued across multiple servers (IP addresses, to be specific) for higher availibility and performance