How Load Balancers Work: L4 vs L7 Explained
Imagine thousands of users hitting your website at once — clicking buttons, watching videos, and placing orders. How do you make sure your servers don’t crash under pressure? That’s where load balancers come in. They’re like smart traffic cops, distributing incoming traffic across multiple servers to keep everything running smoothly. But not all load balancers are the same. Some work at Layer 4 of the OSI model (transport layer), while others operate at Layer 7 (application layer). Let’s break down what that means and why it matters. What Is a Load Balancer? A load balancer is a system (hardware or software) that evenly distributes incoming network traffic across a group of backend servers. This ensures: No single server gets overwhelmed High availability and uptime Faster response times for users Scalability as your app grows Think of it like a restaurant host who directs customers to tables so the kitchen doesn’t get overloaded in one section. L4 Load Ba...