Load Balancer

Overview

This project implements a simple reverse-proxy load balancer in Go. It distributes incoming HTTP requests across multiple backend servers using a round-robin algorithm. The goal is to demonstrate core load-balancing concepts and provide a lightweight, extensible example that can be adapted to more advanced scenarios.

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What Is a Load Balancer?

A load balancer is a critical component in distributed systems and microservices architectures. It sits between clients and a pool of servers, forwarding incoming requests to healthy servers based on a scheduling strategy. Key benefits include:

• Scalability: Distributes traffic to multiple servers to handle high load.
• High Availability: Redirects traffic away from unhealthy or overloaded instances.
• Fault Tolerance: Automatically retries or reroutes failed requests.

Common algorithms include round-robin, least connections, and IP hash. This example uses the simple round-robin approach.

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Project Features

• Reverse Proxy: Uses Go’s httputil.ReverseProxy to forward client requests.
• Round-Robin Scheduling: Evenly distributes requests across backends.
• Health Checks (Stubbed): Interface allows for custom health-check logic.
• Extensible: Easily add new balancing algorithms or monitoring hooks.

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Prerequisites

• Go 1.16+

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Installation & Running

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/yourusername/Load-Balancer-.git
   cd Load-Balancer-

2. Build and Run:

   go build -o lb main.go server.go loadbalancer.go 
   ./lb

3. Access: Open http://localhost:8000 in your browser; requests will be forwarded to the configured backends.

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Code Structure

├── main.go           # Entry point: sets up servers and starts HTTP listener
├── server.go         # Server interface and simpleServer implementation
├── loadbalancer.go   # LoadBalancer struct: round-robin logic and proxy handling
└── README.md         # Project documentation

Key Components

• Server Interface (Address(), isAlive(), Serve()): Abstraction for backend targets.

• simpleServer: Wraps httputil.NewSingleHostReverseProxy, always marked alive.

• LoadBalancer:

  • getNextAvailableServer(): Picks next alive server.
  • serveProxy(): Logs and forwards requests.

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