Good post. Although, this just scratches the surface. There's also caching mechanisms involved in handling requests that might make similar requests faster when served by the same host. Now you're tempted to add sticky sessions to the mix and deal with the perks and problems that comes with that.
Absolutely! I had to pick a stopping point in order to restore balance to my personal life :D
I'd love to see people taking this as inspiration and covering the more advanced topics. I've already started on my next post and it's about a completely different area to load balancing. Very excited.
You could go with sticky sessions, or consistent hashing to maximize cache hit rate. Then you may run into hotspots and look at bounded-load consistent hashing, etc.
