How Load Balancing Works in Kubernetes

Author

Govardhana M K
December 27, 2025

In partnership with

TechOps Examples

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🧠 DEEP DIVE USE CASE

How Load Balancing Works in Kubernetes

Load balancing is the practice of distributing incoming requests across multiple backends instead of sending everything to a single system. The goal is simple:

  • Prevent overload on any one backend

  • Improve availability during traffic spikes

  • Keep responses fast and consistent

  • Continue serving traffic even if one backend fails

A load balancer does not care what runs behind it. It only deals with health, reachability, and distribution. This basic idea stays the same everywhere.

What changes is where the balancing happens and how much intelligence is involved.

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In real systems, load balancing rarely means sending traffic to identical backends.

Context Specific Use Case

In this architecture, a single load balancer fronts multiple backend tiers, each serving a different purpose, while exposing a unified entry point to users.

All incoming traffic reaches the load balancer through the same domain, techopsexamples.com. From there, routing decisions are made at Layer 7 using request context such as the URL path.

Requests targeting the core application routes are forwarded to the application tier. This tier consists of multiple identical application backends that implement business logic and interact with a shared database.

Because these backends are stateless at the request level, traffic can be distributed across them without affecting correctness. The database remains isolated behind the application layer and is never exposed directly to incoming traffic.

At the same time, not all requests need to traverse the application stack. Requests matching specific paths like /upgrade or /posts are routed to dedicated Nginx tiers.

These tiers are optimized for handling web facing responsibilities such as serving static content, performing redirects, or handling lightweight HTTP logic.

They are intentionally decoupled from the application layer to prevent non-critical traffic from consuming application resources.

Although all traffic enters through the same load balancer, each backend group operates as an independent target pool. Health checks, scaling behavior, and failure handling are evaluated separately for application backends and each Nginx tier.

This design achieves two things simultaneously.

  • From the outside, users see a single, consistent endpoint.

  • Inside the system, traffic is deliberately segmented so that application workloads, web workloads, and database access remain isolated.

Having established the fundamentals of request distribution and routing, let’s now dive into the architecture and finer details of how load balancing is implemented in Kubernetes.

  1. Internal Load Balancing in Kubernetes

  2. External Load Balancing in Kubernetes

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