Simon Willison’s Weblog

The power of two random choices, visualized. Grant Slatton shares a visualization illustrating “a favorite load balancing technique at AWS”: pick two nodes at random and then send the task to whichever of those two has the lowest current load score.

Why just two nodes? “The function grows logarithmically, so it’s a big jump from 1 to 2 and then tapers off *real* quick.”