Load balancing plays an important role in optimal performance of any distributed system. This pattern optimizes the action of load balancing by considering the proximity of the Microservice deployment and the turnaround time from previous requests along with other parameters such as current load, health of the instance, and so on. This will enable the system to route a request from a consumer to the nearest performant Microservice instance.

Latency optimized load balancing is also effective in hybrid deployments of Microservices across public and private clouds:

Microsoft Azure Traffic Manager allows you to control the distribution of traffic based on a rule set which can be configured to achieve high availability and performance. More and Traffic manager can be found at: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/traffic-manager-overview/.

Apart from routing, traffic manager can also be used to enable automatic failover to improve the availability of your Microservice deployment.