Difference Between Load Balancer and Route Rules

[#1]

I'm a bit confused between the difference between a load balancer and a route rule. Don't they both dictate the load into the target endpoint... or am I missing something.

Cheers!
Josh

[anilsr · Accepted solution]

@Joshua Soto-Kitcher ,

Load Balancing concept is used to balance API traffic across various servers, Route Rules are used to route the traffic conditionally to different target end points.

See them in action here,

Load Balancing - Explained in 4 Minutes

Route Rules - Explained in 4 Minutes

Hope it helps.

-------------------------------

Anil Sagar

Learn Apigee Concepts in 4 Minutes HandsOn

[iamsunnysehrawa]

@Joshua Soto-Kitcher @Anil Sagar

• <routeRule> tag is to direct the API request to a specific targetEndPoint flow. And its main utility is when we have multiple targetEndPoint Flows for a proxy.

Why we need multiple targetEndPoint flow per proxy?
- Having multiple targetEndPoint options in routeRule we can direct the API request to a desired target server address configured in the targetEndPoint

- Another utility is we can modify the API experience per target, like we can have different quota configurations for our target servers, different mediation policies we can attach to modify the response from target servers. So overall we can create different API versions for the clients by having multiple targetEndPoints for the API.

• Apigee can act like a load balancer for target servers. the cases where the backend service is exposed over different servers then we can load balanced them by configuring named target servers and calling them from targetEndpoint flow using any of the Apigee's load balancing algorithms.

So the purpose of <routeRule> tag is just to direct the API request from proxyEndPoint flow to a specific targetEndPoint flow. And Apigee can act as a load balancer, send API requests to named target servers based on either different environment configurations or Apigee's load balancing algorithms.