Load balancing for small teams

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Most advice about load balancing assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What to keep

Health checks decide whether load balancing helps or hurts. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

How we handle it

Test what happens when one instance is slow rather than dead. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What this looks like day to day

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. Three things worth confirming about load balancing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Sticky sessions quietly limit how far you can scale — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.