Phase 3 Interactive Simulator
Load Balancing Traffic Simulator ⚖️
Simulate real-time traffic routing across backend servers with dynamic health checks.
App Pod Alpha
App Pod Beta
App Pod Gamma
💡 Try toggling one server to DOWN and send a 20x burst to observe automated health check failover in action.
Networking for Scale
When a single monolithic server runs out of capacity, networking is the key to scaling out. Phase 3 covers the infrastructure tools that distribute load:
All Topics in Phase 3
0 of 13 completedLearn the foundational role of load balancers: Eliminating single points of failure, horizontal traffic distribution, health checking, and active-passive failover.
Compare Transport Layer (TCP/UDP) routing against Application Layer (HTTP/gRPC/TLS) intelligent routing: throughput, latency, TLS termination, and path inspection.
Deep dive into traffic distribution algorithms: Static vs Dynamic scheduling, Consistent Hashing, Maglev, Weighted Least Connections, and Peak EWMA.
Clarify the proxy spectrum: Protecting clients (Forward Proxy / Squid) vs shielding server backends (Reverse Proxy / Nginx / Envoy), TLS offloading, and mTLS service mesh.
Master the unified entry point for microservices: Request routing, protocol translation (REST/gRPC), authentication, rate limiting, and the BFF pattern.
Understand Content Delivery Networks: Global edge caching, Anycast BGP routing, origin shielding, cache invalidation, and dynamic content acceleration.
Explore edge compute and caching topologies: Cache keys, cache purging (instant purge vs soft purge), tiered caching, and edge serverless workers (Cloudflare Workers).
Master real-time bidirectional communication: The HTTP 101 Switching Protocols upgrade, framed binary/text transport, connection scaling, and Redis Pub/Sub backplanes.
Compare the 4 real-time web paradigms: Tradeoffs between unidirectional streaming (SSE), full-duplex framing (WebSockets), and HTTP polling fallbacks.
Trace the evolution of the web transport layer: Head-of-Line blocking, binary framing, multiplexing, HPACK/QPACK header compression, and UDP-based QUIC.
Deconstruct high-performance RPC: Protocol Buffer binary serialization, HTTP/2 transport framing, strongly-typed contracts, and 4 streaming modes.
Solve the dynamic ephemeral IP problem in microservices: Service Registries (Consul / etcd / Eureka), Client-Side vs Server-Side Discovery, and Kubernetes DNS.