Certified: The CompTIA CloudNetX Audio Course

Load balancing is a foundational availability and performance mechanism in CloudNetX scenarios, and this episode establishes the baseline concepts needed to reason about it correctly. It defines a virtual IP address as the stable endpoint clients connect to, while the load balancer distributes requests to multiple backend targets to improve resilience and manage demand. The first paragraph focuses on local load balancing within a site or region, explaining how health checks remove unhealthy targets, how distribution methods influence performance and fairness, and why state management matters for application behavior. It also defines global load balancing as directing users across multiple regions or sites based on health, proximity, or policy, typically used to reduce latency and survive regional failure. The episode emphasizes that load balancing is not only about spreading traffic, but also about shaping failover behavior and simplifying client configuration, because the VIP stays stable while backends change.