Round-robin load balancing
Round-robin load balancing distributes successive requests or work items among available destinations in a repeating cyclic order.
Apache Kafka in Action
Round-robin distribution assigns successive records or work items to available partitions or recipients in cyclic order.
- How it is used
- Distributes Kafka messages without keys across topic partitions to spread producer traffic and, when partitions are balanced, broker load.
- How deep it goes
- Explains cyclic placement and Kafka 2.4's batch-level optimization, but does not specify a detailed partitioner algorithm.
- Examples
- Uses a two-partition price-update topic, console-producer commands, and consumer output that differs from production order.
- What you can do after
- Operate/configure it by omitting producer keys when per-product ordering is unnecessary, and choose keys when that ordering matters.
Read how Apache Kafka in Action explains round-robin load balancing →
Build and Orchestrator in Go (From Scratch)
A round-robin scheduler selects machines in a repeating circular order rather than ranking them by a calculated score.
- How it is used
- Distributes manager-submitted tasks across workers through a repeating circular selection order.
- How deep it goes
- Implements selection state and wraparound in nine lines, while stopping short of capacity scoring or sophisticated scheduling.
- Examples
- Uses a Go manager with three localhost workers, incremented ports, submitted tasks, and observed worker selection.
- What you can do after
- Build it from scratch by storing a worker index and implementing advancing, resetting, and returning the selected worker.
Read how Build and Orchestrator in Go (From Scratch) explains round-robin load balancing →
Kafka for Architects
A round-robin approach assigns successive items cyclically across available destinations to distribute work evenly.
- How it is used
- Distributes Kafka producer messages evenly across partitions when sequencing is less important than balanced workload and processing parallelism.
- How deep it goes
- Defines cyclical assignment and its ordering trade-off, but stops short of a low-level implementation walkthrough.
- Examples
- Uses cyclical assignment across partitions and identifies the RoundRobinPartitioner configuration class.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via Kafka producer partitioner configuration when even distribution outweighs per-key ordering.
Read how Kafka for Architects explains round-robin load balancing →
Related concepts
- NGINXused by · NGINX is open-source web-server and reverse-proxy software that serves HTTP content, forwards requests, and can load-balance network traffic.
- class-based weighted fair queuingused by · Class-Based Weighted Fair Queuing is a packet-scheduling technique that assigns traffic classes to queues and guarantees each queue a configured minimum share of bandwidth during congestion.
- Docker Swarm manager nodeused by · A Docker Swarm manager node coordinates the cluster, schedules services and tasks, maintains swarm state, and directs worker nodes.
- NATSused by · NATS is a lightweight, high-performance messaging system supporting publish-subscribe and other communication patterns among distributed applications and services.
- schedulerkind of · A scheduler is a system component that selects, orders, dispatches, or assigns execution resources to tasks according to timing, dependency, placement, or other scheduling criteria.
- load balancingkind of · Load balancing is the distribution of requests or computational work across multiple resources to manage demand, reduce workload imbalance, and improve utilization or availability.
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