Load Balancers vs. Ingress: Which One Should You Prefer?

In the rapidly evolving landscape of cloud-native applications, ensuring high availability, scalability, and efficient traffic management is paramount. As organizations increasingly adopt microservices architectures and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, understanding the tools available for managing traffic becomes essential. Two key components that play a significant role in this domain are Load Balancers and Ingress. While both are designed to manage and distribute traffic, they serve different purposes and are often used in different contexts. This blog post will dive deep into the differences between Load Balancers and Ingress, their use cases, and how to decide which one to prefer in your architecture.

Understanding Load Balancers

What is a Load Balancer?

A Load Balancer is a networking device or software that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers or resources. Its primary purpose is to ensure that no single server is overwhelmed with too much traffic, thereby improving the application's availability, reliability, and performance. Load Balancers can operate at different layers of the OSI model, primarily Layer 4 (Transport Layer) and Layer 7 (Application Layer).

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