A load balancer is a device that distributes network or application traffic across a cluster of servers. Load balancers improve the performance and availability of applications and websites. People use load balancers because they improve applications’ overall speed and stability by distributing the workload across multiple servers.
Additionally, load balancers can provide failover capabilities in case one of the servers goes down. Failover ensures that an operational server is always available to handle the traffic. Finally, load balancers can be used to route traffic based on factors such as location, weight, and capacity.