Orbit-Go

A lightweight, high-performance load balancer written in Go

Orbit-Go is a simple, fast, and extensible load balancer built with Go. It is designed to efficiently distribute traffic across multiple backend services while remaining easy to configure and deploy.

🚀 Features

• High-performance load balancing using Go’s concurrency model
• Multiple load balancing strategies (round-robin, least-connections, iphash, weighted-round-robin etc.)
• Health checks for backend services
• Configurable via file or environment variables
• Minimal dependencies and small binary size

🏗️ Architecture

The following diagram illustrates the high-level architecture of Orbit-Go.

📖 Prerequisites:

• Install Go (version >= 1.23.3): https://golang.org/dl/
• Task https://taskfile.dev/
• API Testing Tool Httpie or Yaak

⚡ Run on your machine

git clone https://github.com/saketv8/orbit-go.git
cd orbit-go

# install dependencies
go mod download

go build -o orbit-go

in one terminal

cd examples

# start the example backend
task run-all

and then in another terminal

# start the main orbit-go server
./orbit-go

🖥️ Orbit-Go in Action

⚙️ Configuration

Orbit can be configured using a configuration config.yaml

Example config.yaml

# config for orbit-go
application:
  name: orbit-go
  version: v0.0.1

# orbit-go server config
server:
  port: 8000
  # available strategies - roundrobin(rr), leastconnection, iphash, weighted-roundrobin (wrr), random
  strategy: "roundrobin"

# available backend
backends:
  - url: "http://localhost:8081"
    weight: 1
  - url: "http://localhost:8082"
    weight: 3
  - url: "http://localhost:8083"
  - url: "http://localhost:8084"

health_check:
  interval: 5s
  timeout: 100s

🧭 About

This project was created to learn Golang and how HTTP works in Go, while applying Go best practices to write scalable, idiomatic code using goroutines, with a focus on networking fundamentals at the OSI Layer 7 level

🌱 Todo / Future Improvements

• support config.yaml
• Support multiple load balancing strategies
• IP hash strategy based on cookies
• Health checker for backend services
• Add and remove backends at runtime without restarting Orbit
• Graceful shutdown of load balancing server
• Admin panel (Web UI) — 50% complete (in progress)
• Prometheus metrics
• Improved error handling and retries
• Configuration hot-reload