What is a load balancer and what is the difference between ingress and egress balancing?

Load balancer — is a component that distributes incoming traffic or requests among multiple servers or services to optimize resource utilization, increase fault tolerance, and improve performance.

Difference between ingress and egress load balancing:

• Ingress load balancing — distribution of incoming traffic, i.e., requests coming into the system from outside. For example, a load balancer accepts HTTP requests from clients and distributes them among several backend servers.

• Egress load balancing — distribution of outgoing traffic, i.e., requests sent out by the system. For example, if a service inside a cluster accesses external APIs through multiple exit channels, the load balancer can distribute these outgoing requests.

In the context of Golang and microservices, ingress balancing is more commonly discussed for distributing client requests, but egress balancing is important for managing outgoing connections and load on external services.