A Hybrid Approach to Microservices Load Balancing

During the past few years, microservices have been becoming a common architectural pattern increasingly used to realize flexible and scalable service-based applications. Microservices have grown in popularity as a mainstay in the business environment, allowing companies to increase development and maintenance speed, predict performance and scale, with scalability being one of the most important nonfunctional requirements to be fulfilled. Load balancing is the most prominent approach in support of scalability. In the realm of microservices, one usually distinguishes between two types of load balancers, namely, client-side and server-side load balancers. This work proposes a novel hybrid approach to microservices load balancing that combines the benefits of client-side and server-side load balancing.