Part 3 — Advanced Load Balancing Topics and Comparisons

maang.io System Design Series

What is this?

You now know what a load balancer is (Part 1) and how it works inside (Part 2). This part is about judgment — the decisions you make as a system grows: which layer to use when you really care about speed, how to balance across the whole planet, the traps that catch teams in production, what to watch on your dashboards, and how to tell a load balancer apart from its two easily-confused cousins.

The one-line idea: the further you scale, the more load balancing becomes about trade-offs — speed vs smarts, one region vs many, simplicity vs control — and the senior skill is naming the trade-off and choosing on purpose.