Components of a load balancer

At it’s most basic, load balancing is made up of three components:

• Pools: Which contain one or more endpoints.
• Endpoints: Which respond to individual requests.
• A load balancer: Which decides which traffic goes to each pool.

How it works

Normally, requests to your application would go to individual servers directly.

With a load balancer, requests first go through the load balancer. Your load balancer then routes requests to specific pools.

Within each pool, requests then go to individual endpoints. And that endpoint is what responds to the request.

    flowchart LR
      accTitle: Pool traffic flow
      accDescr: When an incoming request reaches a pool, it then goes to an endpoint within the pool.
    A[Request 1] --Routed by pool--> Endpoint2
      subgraph P1 [Pool]
        Endpoint1((Endpoint 1))
        Endpoint2((Endpoint 2))
      end

This progression of load balancer —> pool —> endpoint is the core part of how a load balancer works.