What is load balancing in the context of microservices?

Load balancing distributes incoming requests across multiple instances of a service to prevent any single instance from becoming overwhelmed, improving availability and throughput. In microservices, load balancing can happen at multiple levels. Client-side load balancing (e.g., Netflix Ribbon, gRPC built-in) means the calling service picks an instance from the registry using an algorithm like round-robin or least-connections. Server-side load balancing uses a dedicated proxy (NGINX, HAProxy, Kubernetes Service) in front of the service instances. Kubernetes handles load balancing automatically through its Service abstraction, distributing traffic across all healthy pods in a Deployment.