Operate load balancers reliably
Plan TLS termination, zonal resilience, capacity, and useful traffic signals.
- Identify key load-balancer failure modes and interpret request-level metrics.
At TLS termination, a balancer handles certificates and decrypts traffic before forwarding it; re-encryption can protect the backend hop too. Deploy balancers and backends across failure zones, avoid a single overloaded entry point, and test failover. Monitor request rate, error rate, latency percentiles, active connections, rejected connections, backend health, and per-backend imbalance. A balancer can shed load or return a controlled error instead of letting queues grow without bound.
1requests = 1000
2errors = 12
3error_rate = errors / requests
4print(f"error rate: {error_rate:.2%}")error rate: 1.20%
Metrics should be split by backend pool, zone, and response class where useful. Watch both aggregate results and skew: a healthy average can hide one failing backend or one saturated zone.
Key takeaways
Plan TLS behavior and backend-hop protection explicitly.
Use multiple failure zones and test failover.
Monitor percentiles, errors, connections, and imbalance at both pool and backend level.
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