What is the process of distributing the workload across multiple systems?

Load balancing is the process used to distribute the workload evenly across multiple systems or servers. This technique helps to ensure that no single system becomes overloaded, which can lead to performance degradation or potential failure. By spreading out the workload, load balancers can improve the overall efficiency and responsiveness of applications, provide redundancy, and enhance resource utilization.

In a load balancing scenario, incoming requests are dynamically distributed to various servers based on predefined algorithms such as round-robin, least connections, or IP hashing. This ensures that each server handles a fair share of the total workload, thus optimizing resource use and improving service availability.

Additional concepts are relevant to this subject. Clustering typically refers to linking multiple servers to work together as a single system to provide high availability and scalability, while replication involves copying data across multiple locations for redundancy and quick recovery. Fault tolerance focuses on creating systems that continue to function even when one or more components fail. However, load balancing specifically emphasizes the active distribution of workloads to optimize performance, which is why it is the appropriate term for this process.