Follow-up · depth 3
How does L4 vs L7 Load Balancing change at 10× traffic?
How does L4 vs L7 Load Balancing change at 10× traffic?
Answers use simple, clear English.
Audio N/AQuick interview answer
At 10× traffic, L4 vs L7 Load Balancing usually hits queueing and CPU/I/O saturation first — mitigate with concurrency limits, batching, caching, and offloading. Baseline: L4 (TCP) routes by IP/port fast. L7 (HTTP) routes by path/header/cookie — enables sticky sessions, TLS, WAF integration.
Detailed answer
At 10× traffic for L4 vs L7 Load Balancing: 1) Bottleneck shifts from “works on my laptop” to queue delay and resource saturation. 2) Protect the loop/path: timeouts, bulkheads, backpressure, worker offload for CPU work. 3) Scale out carefully: sticky vs stateless, connection pools, cache hit ratio. 4) Prove with load tests that p99 stays inside SLO. Example to cite: ALB routes /api → API target group, /static → S3; NLB for gRPC TCP passthrough. Parent context: Baseline: L4 (TCP) routes by IP/port fast. L7 (HTTP) routes by path/header/cookie — enables sticky sessions, TLS, WAF integration.
Full explanation
Focus on what breaks first and how you keep L4 vs L7 Load Balancing correct under load. L4 (TCP) routes by IP/port fast. L7 (HTTP) routes by path/header/cookie — enables sticky sessions, TLS, WAF integration.
Follow-up questions
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Parent context — L4 vs L7 Load Balancing
Baseline: L4 (TCP) routes by IP/port fast. L7 (HTTP) routes by path/header/cookie — enables sticky sessions, TLS, WAF integration.
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