Load balancers offer tremendous benefits by improving server farm availability, scalability, manageability, and security. Server load balancing is the most popular application for load balancers. Load balancers can perform a variety of health checks to ensure the server, application, and the content served are in good condition. There are many different load-distribution algorithms to balance the load across different types of servers in order to get the maximum scalability and aggregate processing capacity. While stateless load balancing is simple, stateful load balancing is the most powerful and commonly used load-balancing method.

Network address translation forms the foundation for the load balancer’s processing. There are different types of NAT, such as destination NAT and source NAT, that help in accommodating a variety of network designs with load balancers. Direct Server Return helps in load-balancing applications with complex NAT requirements, by obviating the need for destination NAT.