When I was an “Internet Architect” (lofty title alert!) I used to hear this question fairly often in design meetings, whether to run the database (DB) through the load balancer or not. I would almost always come down on the side of “no there’s no point” because the DBs have their own high availability solutions, they don’t benefit from load balancing and there are usually no multi-master solutions. Also, load balancers are expensive and resources are finite on them.
Over the last few years a number of factors have changed, and today the answer is a...
