Another perspective than what BillFranklin wrote above (which is still a great answer) when compared to an internal load balancer, which is what you’d tradition

Another perspective than what BillFranklin wrote above (which is still a great answer) when compared to an internal load balancer, which is what you’d traditionally have to route internal traffic otherwise: * typically mTLS is provided and abstracted away for applications (traffic between services is now authenticated and encrypted) * no single point of failure in the same way * no traffic bottleneck or needing to scale the LB (e.g. limited to bandwidth of what LB can handle) * typically integrates natively with your existing service discovery/control plane (kubernetes/consul/nomad)