alt Hacker Newssigh
See, before the cloud, you used to deploy your code to actual physical servers. If your site became really popular you needed more than one server to run it.
Before commercial and open source load balancers became a thing we literally used HTTP redirects to distribute load. You might visit www.example.com and get redirected to www13.example.com, which was an actual box in a datacenter.
I don't think the internet would exist today if websites just randomly fell over once the number of simultaneous users exceeded the capacity of a single server.
Replies
Why? That looks like a mess. Proxies existed before http, so why not just proxy traffic between your various physical servers to manage load? It’s literally a poor man’s load balancer. It how Travelocity worked way back in the day.
Couldn't you just ghetto load balance by using internal DNS to round robin to a spread of servers with different internal IP ?
When I was at yahoo, we certainly had load balancers, but we didn't have super fancy load balancers that could separate traffic out by path, so each 'property' would use a different hostname (i worked on travel.yahoo.com, which is dead these many years), but we all shared a login cookie (and some other cookies).
We'd have certainly adapted if we couldn't share cookies, but it would have been a lot messier.