Go Load Balancer

A simple, robust HTTP load balancer implementation in Go.

Features

• Round-robin load balancing algorithm
• Automatic health checks for backend servers
• Graceful handling of failed backend servers
• Reverse proxy functionality with custom headers
• Configurable health check intervals

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Go 1.24 or higher

Running the Load Balancer

cd go-load-balancer
go run round-robin/load-balancer.go [options]

Options:

• -port: Port to serve on (default: 8080)
• -check-interval: Interval for health checking backends (default: 1m)

Running Backend Servers

For testing, you can start multiple instances of the simple backend server:

# Start three backends on different ports
go run backend/simple-backend.go -port 8081
go run backend/simple-backend.go -port 8082
go run backend/simple-backend.go -port 8083

How It Works

1. The load balancer distributes incoming HTTP requests to backend servers in a round-robin fashion
2. Periodic health checks ensure that requests are only sent to healthy backends
3. If a backend fails, it's marked as unavailable until it becomes healthy again
4. All requests are proxied transparently with added headers for tracking

Project Structure

• round-robin/: Contains the round robin load balancer implementation
• backend/: Contains a simple backend server for testing