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by puzzle 2995 days ago
It's a load balancer, because, typically, there is more traffic than a single server can handle. That's why I mention pools: it sends traffic to one of {A1, A2, ...} and one of {B1, B2, ...}. Using your terminology, that instance of the load balancer will take the upstream traffic and divvy it up twice, among two separate groups of downstream pools. A load balancing tee proxy/LB is also useful where B is a new implementation that is supposed to handle more traffic. You could e.g. bring up 10 A replicas and 5 B replicas and compare their performance metrics. That setup is closer to reality than one instance of A and one of B (if you want to test soft stickiness, for example).

Anything at Google that does not support load balancing is doomed to melt fairly quickly.