Load Balancing vs High Availability
First and foremost, I want to say that the title of this post Load Balancing vs High Availability is a bit of a misnomer. However I wanted to cover it because it is a topic discussed in many job interviews. If you’re interviewing for a coding job there is a good chance that your understanding of scalability will arise. Therefore you should have a solid understanding of load balancing and high availability.
Guide Tasks
  • Read Tutorial
  • Watch Guide Video
Video locked
This video is viewable to users with a Bottega Bootcamp license
APPLY NOWLEARN MORE

In order to understand Load Balancing vs High Availability, it would help to first walk through what they each represent.

  • Load balancing – Load balancing is the process of spreading a system over multiple machines. This process typically has the goal of making a system more scalable by leveraging more than a single server.
  • High availability – High availability is more of a feature than a process. Essentially high availability means that if one of a system’s components goes down, it won’t bring the entire system down with it.

Load Balancing vs High Availability

Load Balancing

large

As shown in this diagram, a load balancer is an actual piece of hardware that works like a traffic cop for requests. This allows the system to not force 100% of an application’s load on a single machine. For example, can you imagine what would happen if you tried to send all of Facebook’s billion + users to a single server?

The limits of a single server are quite small when it comes to the number of requests that it can simultaneously manage. Which is where load balancing comes in. A well configured load balancer can spread billions of requests across a full farm of servers. This is a process that you’ll need to become familiar with if you’re wanting to work with highly trafficked applications.

High Availability

large

In this diagram you can see how high availability operates. Since a system being highly available is more of a description than a tool there are countless ways that you could map this out. However the key to remember when it comes to high availability is: redundancy.

A highly available system has the ability to instantly redirect requests to a backup system if a component fails. Usually this process is accomplished by the following workflow

  1. Server A has a cloned Server B.
  2. Server B is offline but constantly monitors Server A.
  3. As soon as Server A goes down Server B switches on and all traffic is redirected to Server B.

In this scenario, the official term for Server B is called the hot spare.

Summary

In review, there are two important distinctions between load balancing and high available systems.

  1. Load balancing is connected to an actual piece of hardware, namely the load balancer. Whereas being highly available can be achieved via a number of various processes, some of which can even include a load balancer.
  2. A system can have a load balancer and still not be highly available. If a system is configured to simply route traffic to various servers to decrease the load to any single machine, that does not mean that it’s highly available.

I hope that this has been a helpful discussion on how to answer the coding interview question regarding Load Balancing vs High Availability. And good luck with the interview!