Your load balancer watches every connection to every service you run — which makes it the best vantage point in your infrastructure. The metrics worth watching, the patterns they reveal, and how to feed them into your monitoring platform over SNMP.
Round Robin, Least Connections, weighted variants, and hash-based schedulers each suit different workloads. A practical guide to picking the algorithm that matches how your traffic actually behaves.
Kernel-speed packet forwarding or full application-layer proxying? Understanding the trade-offs between L4 and L7 load balancing — and when to use each — saves you both latency and lost features.
Direct Server Return lets backend servers reply straight to clients, bypassing the load balancer on the return path. Here is how it works, why it matters for high-throughput services, and when it is the wrong tool.