Request Routing

The set of rules and logic that a load balancer or API gateway uses to determine which backend service or server should handle each incoming request. Routing decisions can be based on URL path prefixes (/api/v2/*), HTTP headers (Host, Authorization, X-Region), query parameters, HTTP method, source IP, or geographic location. Advanced L7 load balancers support weighted traffic splitting for canary deployments (e.g., 5% of traffic to new service version), fault injection for chaos engineering, and policy-based routing tied to authentication tokens. Kubernetes Ingress and Gateway API resources express request routing rules as Kubernetes-native objects.