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Load Balancing Decision Explorer

Compare L7 routing policies under hot backends, ejections, draining, and regional failover while the L4 flow stays pinned to one frontend.

Routing policyChoose how the frontend should pick a backend for this request
Affinity keySwap the key that a sticky or hashed policy would try to preserve
ClientThessalonikiGET /checkoutL4 edge203.0.113.40:443five-tuple hash -> fe-072001:db8:84::23:52344 -> 203.0.113.40:443 tcpL7 proxyLeast requestsfrontend ready to parse HTTPcookie session=cart-42app-aath-128 req · 22 msapp-bath-134 req · 26 msapp-csof-131 req · 24 msapp-dsof-130 req · 25 msselected backend
Chosen backend
app-a
ath-1
Observed load
28 active requests
22 ms recent latency
Why it won
Least requests prefers the backend with the lightest live occupancy after applying a small penalty for slow or cold nodes.
Step 1 / 6L4 hashing lands the flow on one frontend proxy

The public entry layer does not know paths or cookies yet. It hashes the five tuple so every packet of the same flow keeps reaching the same frontend.

app-a wins because its queue and latency footprint are the lowest among healthy non-draining nodes in this step.

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