InfoQ Homepage Load Balancing Content on InfoQ
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Meta’s ZGateway Cuts ZippyDB Connections 19x While Handling 1B+ Operations per Second
Meta has introduced ZGateway, a stateless proxy for ZippyDB that centralizes connection management, traffic routing, caching, load balancing, and admission control. The gateway handles more than 1 billion operations per second and about 40% of ZippyDB traffic, while Meta’s model estimates a 19x reduction in persistent connections.
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Stateless MCP Removes Session Affinity Requirements for AWS Server Deployments
AWS details how the latest Model Context Protocol specification removes protocol-level sessions, sticky-session requirements, and session storage for remote MCP servers. The change enables independent request routing and simpler horizontal scaling while shifting application state, retries, observability, and idempotency concerns to other layers.
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Uber Redesigns M3DB Sharding with Subclusters to Limit Failure Impact
Uber has redesigned shard placement in M3DB with fixed size subclusters to limit the impact of node failures, maintenance, and cluster scaling. The approach bounds shard dependencies, preserves replica isolation, and uses a greedy algorithm to select shard migrations while avoiding a separate rebalancing pass and unnecessary data movement.
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How Zalando Built an In-Process Client-Side Load Balancer for One Million Requests per Second
The engineering team at Zalando recently described the design and implementation of an in-process, client-side load balancer for a high-throughput API handling around 1 million requests per second. The result was more predictable latency, a drop in infrastructure costs, and better visibility into where failures actually originate.
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Inside Agoda’s Storefront: a Latency-Aware Reverse Proxy for Improving DNS Based Load Distribution
Agoda engineers developed Storefront, a Rust-based S3-compatible reverse proxy that improves load balancing, request routing, and observability across large-scale object storage systems. The proxy addresses DNS-based distribution limitations, implements latency-aware routing, cross-data-center optimizations, IO safeguards, credential-less authentication, and exposes telemetry via OpenTelemetry.
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Uber Moves from Static Limits to Priority-Aware Load Control for Distributed Storage
Uber engineers detailed how they evolved their storage platform from static rate limiting to a priority-aware load management system. The approach protects Docstore and Schemaless, Uber’s MySQL-based distributed databases, by colocating control with storage, prioritizing critical traffic, and dynamically shedding load under overload conditions.
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Enhancing Reliability Using Service-Level Prioritized Load Shedding: Netflix at QCon SF 2025
At QCon San Francisco, Netflix engineers unveiled their advanced Service-Level-Prioritized Load-Shedding strategy, enhancing reliability during traffic spikes. By prioritizing high-value requests and automating management across microservices, they safeguard user experience and system stability. Key insights stress prioritization, automation, and structured load shedding for optimal resilience.
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Amazon API Gateway Adds Dynamic Routing Based on Headers and Paths
AWS's new dynamic routing rules for Amazon API Gateway empower developers to streamline API traffic management by routing requests based on HTTP headers without complex URL structures. This innovative feature simplifies API versioning, enables fine-grained control, enhances A/B testing, and improves request visibility, making API configurations more efficient and user-friendly.
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Cloudflare Introduces Advanced Load Balancing to Eliminate Hardware Dependency
Cloudflare recently unveiled significant advancements in its load balancing capabilities, aiming to eliminate the need for hardware-based solutions. The company’s latest enhancements integrate seamlessly with Cloudflare One, providing end-to-end private traffic flow support and WARP authenticated device traffic.
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Grab Improves Kafka on Kubernetes Fault Tolerance with Strimzi, AWS AddOns and EBS
Grab updated its Kafka on Kubernetes setup to improve fault tolerance and completely eliminate human intervention in case of unexpected Kafka broker terminations. To address the shortcomings of the initial design, the team integrated with AWS Node Termination Handler (NTH), used the Load Balancer Controller for target group mapping, and switched to ELB volumes for storage.
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Slack Migrates to Cell-Based Architecture on AWS to Mitigate Gray Failures
Slack migrated most of the critical user-facing services from a monolithic to a cell-based architecture over the last 1.5 years. The move was triggered by the impact of networking outages affecting a single availability zone, causing user-impacting service degradation. The new architecture allows incrementally draining all the traffic away from the affected availability zone within 5 minutes.
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Allegro Uses Control Theory for Workload Balancing in its Apache Kafka PubSub Platform
Allegro, the largest eCommerce platform in Poland, implemented dynamic workload balancing in Hermes, its open-source publish-subscribe message broker, built on top of Apache Kafka. The new workload balancing algorithm achieves more uniform resource utilization and lower infrastructure costs.
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Microsoft Azure Cross-Region (Global) Load Balancer Now Generally Available
Microsoft recently announced the general availability (GA) of Azure cross-region (Global) Load Balancer in all Azure public and national cloud regions.
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Dropbox Unplugs Data Center to Test Resilience
Dropbox has published a detailed account of why and how they unplugged an entire data center to test their disaster readiness. The disaster readiness team began building tools to make performing frequent failovers possible, and ran their first formalized failover in 2019. Eventually, with new tooling and procedures, the data center was unplugged. This provided a significantly reduced RTO.
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HashiCorp Consul-Terraform-Sync Adds Task Creation API and New Integrations
HashiCorp has released version 0.5 of Consul-Terraform-Sync. CTS enables automating common networking tasks by creating Terraform modules that can be run as services are added or removed from Consul. This release adds new secure API endpoints to facilitate modifying existing tasks, new ecosystem integrations, and support for triggering Terraform workflows on Consul key-value changes.