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Layer 4 vs Layer 7 Load Balancing

Kay James
October 14, 2022 | 1 min read
Layer 4 vs Layer 7 Load Balancing

Understand the difference between layer 4 and layer 7 load balancing in a Kubernetes cluster.

Today, we talk about layer 4 vs layer 7 load balancing. Layer 4 refers to the connection level of the OSI network stack and layer 7 refers to the application level. As modern network protocols evolve, more and more protocols are taking advantage of piggybacking and multiplexing requests onto a single connection. This means that if your Kubernetes services communicate using HTTP/2, gRPC, or any protocol that multiplexes requests onto connections, it is very important for you to use a layer 7 load balancer. This video explains why:

Learn More

To learn more about load balancing in a Kubernetes cluster, check out the following resources:

Load balancing

Kubernetes Network architecture

Edge Stack API Gateway

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