What is the goal of load balancing?

Measuring request performance is part of monitoring, not the core goal of load balancing.

Distributing requests across different versions of an application (e.g., A/B testing) can be a use case of load balancing, but the core goal is simply distributing requests to available instances.

Distributing instances of an application across the cluster is a function of a scheduler, not directly load balancing, which focuses on distributing requests to already deployed instances.

The primary goal of load balancing is to efficiently distribute incoming network traffic or requests among a group of backend servers or application instances. This distribution prevents any single server from becoming overloaded, thereby improving application responsiveness, availability, and overall performance.