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Hosting an app for a global (or growing) audience means one server in one place isn't enough. Global load balancing distributes users across multiple origins based on health, geography, and latency — and fails over automatically.
What it balances on
| Method | Steers by | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Geographic | Route users to the nearest region | Latency-sensitive apps, data residency |
| Latency | Pick the fastest-responding origin | Real-time apps, VoIP, video |
| Health checks | Send traffic only to origins that are up | All production workloads |
| Weighted | Split traffic by capacity or for blue/green rollouts | Canary deploys, capacity management |
Local vs. global
- Local load balancing spreads traffic across servers in one data center.
- Global load balancing spreads it across data centers and regions — the key to true resilience.
Why it matters
Continuous health checks detect a failed origin and remove it from rotation in seconds — users never see the outage. Combined with an Anycast edge, this delivers both speed and near-continuous availability.
IDENETY design tip: pair global load balancing with a tested failover runbook and monitoring. Automatic failover is only trustworthy when you've validated it — we build and test that as part of the architecture. See our Anycast guide for the edge layer, and our multi-vendor resilience guide for dual-provider designs.
Contact our engineers to discuss global load balancing or multi-region architecture.