What's the difference between High Availability and Load Balancing?

Many IT professionals confuse these terms, but they solve completely different problems. In this episode of Technically U, we break down both concepts and show you how they work together to create robust, reliable systems.

🔧 What You'll Learn:

High Availability (HA) explained - what it is and why it matters

Understanding "nines" - 99.9%, 99.99%, 99.999% uptime

Active-passive vs active-active configurations

Load balancing fundamentals and algorithms

Layer 4 vs Layer 7 load balancing

How HA and load balancing complement each other

Real-world architecture examples

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

Cloud vs on-premises considerations

Cost analysis and best practices

💡 Perfect for:

Network engineers, cloud architects, system administrators, DevOps professionals, IT managers, and anyone responsible for maintaining reliable online services

.📊 Quick Comparison:

High Availability:✓ Goal: Minimize downtime✓ Method: Redundancy + failover✓ Activates: When failures occur✓ Metric: Uptime percentageLoad Balancing:✓ Goal: Optimize performance✓

Method: Distribute traffic✓ Activates: Always active✓ Metric: Response time/throughput

🛠️ Technologies Mentioned:

AWS Elastic Load Balancing & Auto Scaling

Azure Load Balancer & Availability Zones, Google Cloud Load Balancing, NGINX & HAProxy, F5 & Citrix load balancers, Kubernetes orchestration, Database replication & clustering

📚 Resources:

AWS High Availability: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/

Azure Availability Zones: https://azure.microsoft.com/solutions/high-availability/

NGINX Load Balancing: https://www.nginx.com/

HAProxy Documentation: https://www.haproxy.org/

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💬 Questions about HA or load balancing? Drop them in the comments

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