title: Physical vs software load balancer?
body: <p>I just read this article on the history of load balancers:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://devcentral.f5.com/s/articles/what-is-load-balancing-24740" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://devcentral.f5.com/s/articles/what-is-load-balancing-24740</a></p>
  
  <p>going through DNS servers through Cluster IP software based to finally physical devices.</p>
  
  <p>I have also read about HAProxy and nginx in:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://www.loggly.com/blog/benchmarking-5-popular-load-balancers-nginx-haproxy-envoy-traefik-and-alb/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.loggly.com/blog/benchmarking-5-popular-load-balancers-nginx-haproxy-envoy-traefik-and-alb/</a></p>
  
  <p>But HAProxy and nginx are server software application that needs to be installed, configured and run like an apache web server. </p>
  
  <p>So how does this fit with the first article that says load balancing is primarily handled by dedicated hardware?</p>
  
  <p>I assume its a combination of both. E.g. in a network you might setup a physical loadbalancer and behind that one or more webservers running e.g. HAProxy for additional load balancing. But its not clear to me when a loadbalancer should be a physical dedicated device and when you can just install e.g. haproxy on a linux server instead.</p>