balancermanager

BalancerManager is a software component designed to orchestrate and optimize load balancing across multiple service instances. It acts as a centralized control plane that determines how incoming traffic should be distributed, with the goals of improving resource utilization, reducing latency, and increasing system resilience.

It typically comprises a management API, a state repository, and pluggable load balancing strategies. The management API provides programmatic access to configuration, health information, and policy definitions. The state repository stores information about backend health, capacity, and current routing rules. Pluggable strategies enable algorithms such as round robin, least connections, and weighted distribution, as well as advanced modes like session affinity and canary routing.

Balancers and other agents periodically report health signals to BalancerManager, which aggregates data and updates runtime routing decisions. Clients may retrieve configuration on demand or subscribe to change notifications. The system is designed to support dynamic reconfiguration with minimal disruption, enabling gradual rollouts and rapid rollback if health signals deteriorate.

Typical deployment scenarios include cloud-native microservices platforms, where BalancerManager coordinates ingress controllers or proxy instances, and hybrid environments requiring centralized policy enforcement. It often integrates with monitoring and observability stacks and authentication mechanisms to ensure secure and auditable traffic management.

Considerations for deployment include ensuring high availability of the BalancerManager itself, securing APIs, and managing the state store to avoid single points of failure. Some implementations also provide compatibility with service meshes and conventional load balancers to enable incremental adoption.