[nimbius]

its honestly not, but younger developers can be forgiven for assuming traefik is all you need. the learn-to-code camps really did a number on kids these days :(

use DSR and 50% of your traffic is taken care of. https://www.loadbalancer.org/blog/direct-server-return-is-si...

explore load balancing lower in the stack based on ASN to preroute stuff for divide and conquer. (geolocated, etc...)

weighted load balancing only works for uniform traffic sources. youll need to weight connections based on priority or location, backend heavy transactions (checkout vs just browsing the store) and other conditions that can change the affinity of your user (sometimes dynamically.) keepalived isnt mentioned once, or .1q trunk optimization, or SRV records and failover/HA thats performed in most modern browsers based on DNS information itself.

[SteveNuts]

> most modern browsers based on DNS information itself.

I went down this rabbit hole and was surprised how all over the place the behavior was against various http clients (not just browsers). Very little consistency in how the IPs in the dns response are retried, if at all.

[miggy]

Author here. Thanks for sharing these thoughts. You’re right that DSR, ASN-based routing, SRV records, and other lower-layer approaches are important in certain setups.

This post is focused primarily on Layer 7 load balancing, connection and request routing based on application-level information, so it doesn’t go into Layer 3/4 techniques like DSR or network-level optimizations. Those are certainly worth covering in a broader series that spans the full stack.