Infrastructure that built the web: a short history of load balancers

The internet did not emerge from a single, overarching blueprint. It was the cumulative effect of engineers hitting constraints and improvising solutions. Some of those solutions became so fundamental that many of us take them for granted today, writes Paul Osman.

Load balancing was one such solution. But how did it come about? Who came up with the idea and what happened when it scaled beyond anything the creators could’ve imagined? 

On January 29, the Kubernetes Steering Committee published a statement about ingress-nginx, an ingress controller deployed in roughly half of all Kubernetes environments. The project will be retired in March 2026 due to lack of maintainers. No more releases. No more bug fixes. No more security patches.

The Committee's statement is blunt: "Choosing to remain with Ingress NGINX after its retirement leaves you and your users vulnerable to attack. None of the available alternatives are direct drop-in replacements. … Half of you will be affected. You have two months left to prepare."

As to how such critical infrastructure became neglected, one possibility is, ironically, that load balancing is so ubiquitous that nobody thinks about it anymore.