Load balancing serves two main purposes—to provide further fault tolerance and to distribute the load. This is achieved by dividing incoming requests against one or more backend servers, so that you get the combined output of these multiple servers. As most load balancer configurations are generally configured as a reverse proxy (as detailed in the previous chapter), this makes NGINX a great choice.
By increasing your fault tolerance, you can ensure the reliability and uptime of your website or application. In the realms of Google or Facebook, where seconds of downtime can cause chaos, load balancers are a critical part of their business. Likewise, if you have occasional issues with your web server, or want to be able to conduct maintenance without bringing your site down, then a load balancer will greatly enhance your setup.
The distributed load side of a...
