Interesting to compare with Google's approach to the same problems: https://sre.google/sre-book/load-balancing-datacenter/ https://sre.google/sre-book/load-bala

Interesting to compare with Google's approach to the same problems: https://sre.google/sre-book/load-balancing-datacenter/ https://sre.google/sre-book/load-balancing-datacenter/ In my experience Google's deterministic subsetting usually ensures backends have even connection counts. There's one significant corner case though: a large backend service that has a large number of small clients, such that client_task_count * subset_size < backend_task_count. Then it basically degrades to random selection. This can happen to infrastructure that supports all of Google's products, many of which are relatively tiny. Seems like their "Continuous Ring Coordinates" section onward is designed to address this same problem. I got a bit lost following it though; I might need to read through it sometime my kids are not also wanting my attention...