What is the primary function of a load balancer in a microservice architecture?

The primary function of a load balancer in a microservice architecture is to distribute incoming requests to service instances. This is essential in a microservices environment, where multiple instances of services may be running to handle traffic load efficiently. By distributing workloads evenly among these instances, a load balancer optimizes resource use, enhances responsiveness, and increases the availability of services.

The load balancer ensures that no single instance becomes overwhelmed with too many requests, which could lead to slower response times or service failures. It also contributes to fault tolerance; if one service instance goes down, the load balancer can redirect traffic to other healthy instances, ensuring continued operation without interruption.

Other functions such as storing sensitive business data, encrypting data in transit, or aggregating service responses are not the primary roles of a load balancer. These functions may belong to different components in a microservices architecture, but they do not adequately describe the core responsibility of a load balancer in managing and distributing network traffic.