The application layer load balancing is needed to ensure a safe, secure flow of traffic from API gateways to the healthy servers, different set of load balancing algorithms are implemented to carry out different types of load balancing.
The load balancer serves as the primary interface for clients, efficiently spreading incoming application traffic among a range of targets located in different Availability Zones. This allocation enhances the accessibility of applications and ensures horizontal scalability.
The source traffic which will be protocol-specific traffic will hit the application load balancer where the user metric, health checks and redirects workloads will be handled .
Based on the traffic type the load balancers can carry out Routing based on: Health checks, Protocol, Algos, and content-based. Only Once the routing schema is configured, the load balancer will direct and distribute traffic among Targets.
The load balancer will redirect traffic to the following targets:
- Servers
- Containers
- Kubernetes cluster
- APIs
- Computing instances
- Memory Instances
- Serverless
NOTE: The load balancer’s job is to evenly distribute the load at the application level. The application layer load balancer and network layer load balancer operate at different layers of the OSI model. The application load balancer works at the Application layer, while the network layer load balancer operates at the network layer.
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