Load Balancer Config Generator

A load balancer distributes incoming network traffic across multiple backend servers to improve availability, scalability, and fault tolerance. When one server fails or becomes overloaded, the load balancer routes traffic to healthy servers. Common examples include nginx, HAProxy, AWS ALB, and Cloudflare Load Balancing.

Round-robin distributes requests evenly in sequence across all backends — simple and predictable. Least-connections routes each new request to the backend with the fewest active connections — better for requests with variable processing time. IP-hash consistently routes the same client IP to the same backend, maintaining session affinity without shared session storage.

nginx is a full web server and reverse proxy with excellent static file serving, SSL termination, and HTTP/2 support. Use nginx when you also serve web content or need tight HTTP feature integration. HAProxy is a dedicated high-performance proxy with richer load balancing algorithms, better Layer 4 (TCP) support, and more detailed stats. Use HAProxy for pure load balancing in high-throughput TCP/HTTP scenarios.

Health checks periodically probe each backend to verify it can handle requests. A backend that fails health checks is temporarily removed from the pool, preventing the load balancer from sending traffic to a broken server. Without health checks, the load balancer will send requests to down servers, resulting in errors for users. Always configure meaningful health check paths (e.g. /health or /ping) that verify the application layer, not just TCP connectivity.

With SSL termination, the load balancer decrypts HTTPS traffic and forwards plain HTTP to backends. This reduces CPU overhead on each backend, centralizes certificate management, and simplifies backend configuration. Traffic between the load balancer and backends travels on your private network unencrypted. If you need end-to-end encryption (for compliance), use SSL passthrough instead, where the load balancer forwards raw TLS to backends.

connect timeout (1-5s): how long to wait for a TCP connection to a backend. send timeout (30-60s): how long to wait to send a request. read timeout (30-60s): how long to wait for a response. For long-running operations (file uploads, AI requests), increase read timeout significantly (120-600s). For fast API responses, keep all timeouts tight (10-30s) to fail fast and free connections.