Scaling Intermediate
Load Balancer Challenge
Route simulated traffic across backend servers using round robin, weighted round robin, least connections, and random strategies.
- Time
- 6-10 minutes
- Concept
- Load balancing strategies
Backend concept
Load Balancing & Scaling
Round robin, weighted routing, least connections, health checks, overload, and horizontal scaling.
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Why this matters
Traffic distribution decisions shape latency, resilience, and how safely a service absorbs spikes.
How to practice
Route traffic with capacity, health, connection load, and fairness in mind.
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Learning objectives
- Compare routing strategies under changing server capacity.
- Understand overload, latency, and health-aware routing.
- Connect horizontal scaling to practical traffic distribution.
- Match rate limits to the resource being protected.
- Distinguish per-IP, per-user, per-account, cost-based, and concurrency limits.
- Use Retry-After, backoff, jitter, and circuit breakers to reduce overload.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Treating all servers as equal when they have different capacity.
- Ignoring server health during traffic spikes.
- Using sticky sessions without considering uneven load.
- Using only per-IP limits for authenticated or account-level abuse.
- Applying the same raw request limit to cheap and expensive operations.
- Relying on client-side debounce as the only protection.
Games for Load Balancing & Scaling
Start with the first game, then use local review history to revisit missed decisions.
Scaling Intermediate
Rate Limit Architect
Choose rate limiting designs for realistic backend traffic patterns, from public APIs and login endpoints to queues, webhooks, and retry storms.
- Time
- 6-9 minutes
- Concept
- Rate limiting, fairness, backpressure, and abuse protection
Reliability Intermediate
Circuit Breaker Clinic
Diagnose dependency failures and choose circuit breaker, timeout, fallback, retry, half-open, and bulkhead strategies that reduce blast radius.
- Time
- 6-9 minutes
- Concept
- Circuit breakers, timeouts, retries, fallbacks, and dependency isolation