Balancing the Load (Without Losing Your Mind)

Picture this: It's Black Friday. Your e-commerce site is getting hammered. You have five servers, but for some reason, Server 3 is on fire while the other four are chilling. Why? Because your load balancer is dumb.

We tend to think of load balancing as this solved problem—just "round-robin it" and go home, right? Well, I learned the hard way that randomness isn't always your friend, and "least connections" sounds great until a sticky session ruins your day.

This visualization is my attempt to show the chaos of distributed systems without the pager duty alerts. You can spin up servers, kill them off, and switch algorithms on the fly. Watch what happens when you use a Random strategy versus Least Connections under heavy load.

Spoiler: It's not always pretty, but it's beautiful to watch.

Inspired by samwho.dev/load-balancing