With such an eventful year of releases and development, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on all thats been accomplished this trip around the sun. Before we do that, a quick message to the users who've made this year so special. Thank you so much for joining us on this amazing journey. It is your trust and unwavering support which has helped us grow this vision into a reality.

Over the last few months, you may have noticed that many of our changelog releases mentioned the release of, and improvements to, Cycle’s native load balancer. While this load balancer still officially remains in beta status, we wanted to begin diving into the details around it a bit more thoroughly: What is it? Why did we build it? How can you use it?

In part 1 of this 2 part blog we looked at some common engineering tradeoffs. But how might someone navigate these tradeoffs and build a model that works for their product? Here are some core concepts that can help along the way.