Load Balancing: The Intuition Behind the Power of Two Random Choices

    In dynamic resource allocations and load balancing, one of the most well-known and fascinating algorithms is the so-called “power of two random choices,” which proposes a very simple change to the random allocations that yields exponential improvement. I was lucky enough to have implemented this very technique on a gigantic scale to improve the resource utilization of AWS Lambda, and yet I struggled to “feel” it intuitively for a long time.

In this article, I’d like to share my mental model for understanding this algorithm which also helps build a good intuition for many other advanced techniques in this area.

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