Request Journey Visualizer

Initiates TCP+TLS to edge IP. Sends HTTP/2 request with headers, auth token, and optional body.

DNS is the first load balancer — multiple A records or anycast routing means different clients resolve to different edge IPs based on geography. Cloudflare returns the nearest PoP IP. TTL cached in OS — lookup adds ~8ms first time, 0ms cached.

TLS terminates here. Checks edge cache. If hit → serve from cache. If miss → forward to origin. Adds CF-Ray, X-Forwarded-For headers.

Inspects request: SQLi, XSS, bad bots, path traversal, rate limit per IP/token. Block → 403/429. Pass → forward. Adds ~0.5ms.

Operates at TCP level — sees only IP and port, never reads HTTP. Blindly forwards raw TCP connections to backend nodes. Extremely fast (~0.1ms). No TLS termination. Used when you need millions of connections/sec or UDP (e.g. DNS, game servers). This comes BEFORE the L7 LB.

Terminates TLS. Reads full HTTP request — headers, path, cookies. Smart routing decisions: /api → API nodes, /upload → storage nodes, sticky sessions by cookie. Health checks per HTTP path. Comes AFTER L4 LB. This is what most people mean when they say "load balancer".

Finest-grained routing — by path prefix, header value, query param. Rate limiting, auth header validation, gzip, upstream keepalive pools. Sits inside your own infrastructure, closest to app servers. In small setups this collapses with the L7 LB.

Reads Ingress resources. Routes by host/path rules to ClusterIP Services. TLS termination option. Backed by nginx or Traefik.

Virtual IP backed by iptables DNAT rules (kube-proxy). Selects healthy pods via endpoint slice. Round-robin across pod IPs.

Your actual application code. Checks Redis cache, queries Postgres, builds response. Envoy sidecar handles mTLS if mesh enabled.

In-memory cache. Hit → return in <1ms. Miss → query DB, populate cache. TTL-based expiry. Cache key: user:42:profile.

Connection pool (PgBouncer). Query planning, index scan. Result returned to pod. Write goes to primary, reads can go to replica.