Layer 7 Load Balancing

Load balancing at the OSI application layer (Layer 7) that inspects HTTP/2/gRPC application data — headers, URLs, cookies, query strings, and gRPC method names — to make intelligent routing decisions. L7 load balancers fully terminate the client connection, parse the request, apply routing rules, and open a new connection to the chosen backend. This enables content-based routing (route /api/* to one backend, /static/* to another), sticky sessions via cookie insertion, A/B testing, canary deployments, and JWT validation at the edge. Nginx, HAProxy in HTTP mode, Envoy, and AWS ALB are common L7 implementations.