DigitalOcean’s managed load balancer product allows customers to route traffic to Droplets and DigitalOcean Kubernetes nodes hosting their application. In this post, we’ll walk through the steps we took to scale the DO Load Balancer to 1,000,000+ connections over the past few years.

DO (DigitalOcean) provides insights into cloud computing, infrastructure as code, and developer tools, offering tutorials and documentation for deploying and managing applications on the cloud. By exploring DO's curated content, developers can learn about cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes deployment patterns, and best practices for building scalable and resilient applications. Whether you're a startup founder, indie developer, or enterprise IT professional, DO offers resources to accelerate your cloud journey and optimize your infrastructure for success.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean managed to scale its load balancer to handle over 1,000,000 connections by evolving its architecture. Initially starting with a single load balancer Droplet, DigitalOcean iteratively improved its solution through vertical scaling and eventually adding a new passthrough network load balancer (NLB) layer. This architecture utilizes BGP and ECMP to spread traffic and Katran for efficient load balancing. The changes allowed for better high availability, predictable pricing, and the ability to handle up to 2 million connections, ensuring seamless transitions and scaling for customer applications.

DigitalOcean Load Balancer: Scaling to 1,000,000+ Connections

DigitalOcean Load Balancer current implementation